City of Ruins

THIRTY-EIGHT



Coop paced as he waited for the team to arrive in the briefing room. He, Yash, and Dix had places at the head of the table. Lynda’s crew now had control of the bridge, and the rest of Coop’s team had gone to dinner or to their evening recreation.

Anita and Perkins had both protested; they wanted to be part of the meeting. But Coop wanted the briefing to remain as private as possible. After his conversation with Rossetti while she was in the base, he was worried about the information the exploratory team would bring back.

The exploratory team arrived in the briefing room with their handhelds. They all had wet hair and loose-fitting clothes, having cleaned up after their mission. The white environmental suits looked gray upon their return, and they’d peeled them off in the airlock, but some of the particles still stuck to their clothing, which was why Coop had approved real-water showers as well as the standard sonic shower. He also made them change in the decontamination area just in case.

The scientists and engineers moved toward the back of the room. The commanders clustered near Coop, Yash, and Dix. Rossetti had turned on the wall screens when she came in. She had plans for this briefing, then, which was one of the things Coop liked about her.

She thought ahead.

Currently, the screens had no images, just an occasional multicolored line through the center to show that the screens were drawing power.

Coop closed the briefing room door, then took his seat at the head of the table. “What’ve you got?” he asked Rossetti.

She was the only one of the group who didn’t look tired. She sat, spine straight, her small hands flat on the tabletop.

“First,” she said, “we don’t need the suits. Every test we did says the atmosphere inside that room is fine.”

“And the particles?” Dix asked.

“Harmless,” she said. “They’ve been through more testing than we usually do on anything. They seem to be unbonded nanobits, and we’ve all worked around unbonded nanobits before.”

They had. The bits occasionally got into the lungs, but could be removed with little effort. Many of the Fleet’s crew members had no reaction to nanobits at all, and could, in fact, absorb them. It was, one of the medics once told Coop, a genetically desired trait that seemed to have developed in the Fleet’s population over time.

Rossetti glanced at the others from her team, then said, “It would be easier to work in the repair room without the environmental suits.”

Her team had clearly asked her to say that. She hadn’t done any hands-on work, so this wasn’t coming from her experience.

“So noted,” Coop said. He would make no promises without consulting with his best people. “What else do you have for me?”

Rossetti took a deep breath, then pressed her hands against the tabletop. He finally understood why she sat that way; it was a calming gesture, one she clearly needed.

“Do you recall what I told you, sir, when I was on the repair room floor?”

“Yes,” he said, and didn’t elaborate. He hadn’t mentioned it to his team, but he would tell them if they needed to know.

“Apparently, I was right. The sector base had been long abandoned, sir. The mandatory shutdown sequence began one hundred years after we left.” She spoke flatly, as if the news hadn’t bothered her at all. But her splayed hands belied that.

“One hundred years?” Dix’s voice rose slightly. He looked surprised.

But Yash didn’t. Her features remained impassive.

Coop’s heart was pounding. “We left a month ago.”

“Yes, sir,” Rossetti said. “But the elapsed time in the station is at least two hundred years, maybe longer.”

She hadn’t insulted his intelligence by explaining how such a thing could happen. They all knew. It was one of the risks of the anacapa drive.

“You’re certain of this?” Coop looked at the scientists and engineers. What he had initially taken for exhaustion was defeat. And fear.

If their calculations were right, they were at least two hundred years in their own future, in an empty sector base, with a damaged ship.

They saw only catastrophe.

Coop didn’t. If he could repair the Ivoire, he could send her through fold-space to the place where the Fleet might be. His calculations (and theirs) could be as much as fifty years off, but that wouldn’t matter. The Fleet followed a set trajectory. Only battles and meetings with other cultures changed the timeline. Coop’s team could guess the farthest that the Fleet would get on that trajectory, and go there. If the Fleet had already arrived, they could continue until they caught it (which wouldn’t take long). If the Fleet hadn’t arrived yet (which was more likely), they could wait for it to catch them.

The older members of the crew might never see the Fleet again, but the younger members would.

“Two hundred years is manageable,” Yash said softly, clearly mistaking his silence for shock.

“I know,” he said, just as softly, silencing her.

He folded his own hands on the tabletop. He was strangely calm. Now that he knew what was happening, he would probably remain calm until they had a firm plan.

“What kind of evidence do you have?” he asked Rossetti.

She turned to one of the engineers, the only one who Coop had ever interacted with, an older man by the name of José Cabral.

“The equipment itself gives us the timeline,” Cabral said. “The sector base closed one hundred years after we left. A rudimentary staff remained, those who didn’t want to travel with the Fleet to Sector Base Y, which was where this group would be posted. This staff continued to live on the surface, charged with maintaining the equipment at low power levels for the next fifty years.”

Coop nodded. This was standard procedure.

Dix shifted in his chair. The news clearly made him nervous.

“After fifty years without human contact,” Cabral said, “the equipment went dormant. Everything shut down except the touch command.”

Touch command. Meaning that the systems would only reactivate if the equipment got touched by human hands. Coop would have to confirm that with Yash, but he didn’t think that some kind of falling debris would activate the system. Just contact from a member of the Fleet. At least, that was what he had been told.

“How long has this base been dormant?” Coop asked.

“Impossible to tell, sir,” Cabral said. “When the system goes dormant, even its internal clock mechanism ceases. Only the anacapa drive continues to reaction, at a very low level, of course, and then only because it is safer to keep the drive running than it is to shut it down.”

Coop nodded. He had been told that as well.

“If I may, sir.” One of the scientists, a middle-aged woman, spoke up. She was thin, with harsh lines around her mouth and eyes. Coop had to struggle to recall her name, which he had only heard in the context of this mission, “The evidence points toward the machinery being off for a very long time.”

One of the other scientists held up his hand, as if to stop her, but she caught his hand in her own and brought it down.

“What evidence?” Coop asked.

“The particles, sir,” she said. “Nanobits are durable. They don’t lose their bonding except in a few instances. Most nanobits lose their bonding through a particular kind of weapon fire, which we see no evidence of here. It could also be caused by a chemical reaction, which we also have no evidence of. In fact, if the chemical reaction had occurred, the room itself would be toxic.”

“And the other instance?” Coop asked.

“Time,” she said. “Specifically, five hundred to a thousand years, sir.”

“We don’t have proof of that,” said the scientist whose hand she still held. “We just have supposition.”

“And past experience,” she said. “We’ve encountered this before, and by we, I mean the Fleet. Never have the nanobits lost their bonding in less than five hundred years.”

Coop’s stomach flipped. He had to work to keep his hands relaxed, so that his knuckles wouldn’t show white.

“We’ll have to test to be certain,” said one of the other scientists. He wasn’t looking at Coop, but at Dix. Dix, who sat rigidly next to Coop. Dix, who, rumor had it, had fallen in love with one of the chefs on the Geneva.

The Geneva, which was traveling with the Fleet.

If the Fleet was five hundred years distant from them, in no way could Coop plot the Fleet’s course. There were too many variables. Two hundred years was at the very edge of possible.

Five hundred years meant that the Ivoire might never rejoin the Fleet.

Coop wouldn’t let himself think of that. He didn’t have proof.

“The equipment itself isn’t damaged,” Rossetti said, trying to take control of the briefing back from her scientist. “It’s just old.”

Coop nodded.

“We should be able to use information in the database to help us fix the

Ivoire,” she said.

He nodded again. He wasn’t thinking about that quite as much. He knew his engineers could fix the Ivoire. She had extensive damage, but none of it was catastrophic.

He was more concerned about their current situation.

“The outsiders,” he said, and paused. Everyone looked at him. They clearly hadn’t expected him to mention the outsiders at this point. “You told me their suits looked underdeveloped.”

He said this last to Yash.

She nodded. “Ours are technically superior, if that glove is any indication.”

“Oxygen cylinders, knives, inferior suits,” he said. “Their society didn’t develop from ours, then.”

“Probably not,” Yash said.

“So the settlement on the surface is gone,” he said.

She shrugged. “We don’t know that.”

He nodded again. Two hundred years was a long time. They were going to need to know about the history of Sector Base V as well as Venice City, what they had missed, and what they faced.

“I assume that the shutdown was a standard shutdown,” he said to Rossetti.

By that, he meant that the sector base was shut down because the Fleet had moved on, not because of some problem on the planet itself.

Rossetti had to look at her team.

José Cabral nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said, answering for the team. “The shutdown was ordered by the Fleet and completed according to procedure. Staff remained behind. At that time, Venice City was a thriving community, and many people did not want to leave.”

“No indications that anything went wrong on the surface?” Coop asked.

“None,” Cabral said.

Coop nodded. “Clearly, we’re going to need more information. We need to know how much time has lapsed. We’re going to have to try to figure that out. I assume there are tests you can use on the equipment which will tell us how long it has been unused?”

He directed this last at the scientists.

“Yes and no, sir,” the woman said. “We will know within a few decades how long the equipment’s been sitting there. But we might not learn exactly. It depends on the conditions underground. Without an accurate history, we won’t be able to be precise.”

“Doesn’t the equipment record conditions in the room around it?” Coop directed this last at Cabral.

Cabral looked at the other engineers. They silently conferred.

“I know for a fact that we’ll have a record of the first one hundred and fifty years, sir,” Cabral said. “After that . . .”

He let his voice trail off as he looked at the other engineers again. None of them spoke.

They didn’t know for certain.

“We can date the parts, do experiments to track decay,” one of the scientists said, sounding a little more excited than Coop expected.

“But we’ll just be guessing,” another scientist said.

“We’ll be accurate within a fifty- to hundred-year range,” said the woman.

“I think closer to two hundred years,” said the scientist whose hand she held.

“Clearly, we don’t know, sir,” Rossetti said, more to stop the argument among her people than anything.

“Can we map the corridors from the repair room? Get a sense of the surface?” Coop asked.

“It’ll take time,” one of the engineers said. “The equipment will need a little repair.”

“I think we can map the corridors, sir,” the woman said.

“That’s a start.” Coop stood. He paced for a moment, thinking this through. Then he paused and glanced at Yash.

“Let me see the schematics of the base from our files,” he said.

She pressed a button, and the base’s plans appeared on the screens. A warren of tunnels and corridors and exits onto the surface.

On another screen, she put up a map of Venice City, without him having to request it.

He studied the maps. Cities weren’t like ships. Cities changed over time.

Sometimes cities built over their past. Sometimes they retained their historic buildings.

But every city he had ever visited, whether established by the Fleet or not, had historians and libraries and methods of keeping track of its own past.

“We’re going to need to go up there,” he said, more to himself than to everyone else.

“And how are we going to explain our presence?” Dix asked, his voice wobbling.

Coop turned and looked at him. Dix was gray. He looked ill.

For the first time since Coop met him, Dix actually seemed terrified.

“I mean, if they’re sending outsiders down here, and the outsiders seem surprised at the room itself, and they wear environmental suits that they don’t need—”

“We don’t know if they don’t need them,” Yash said. “They might.”

“You think they have different physiology?” Dix asked.

Yash shrugged. “I don’t know. People get used to different things. Maybe other parts of the sector base are toxic. We don’t know anything.”

Dix’s mouth thinned. He didn’t like what she was saying.

“That’s a side track,” Coop said to Dix. “You were making a point.”

Dix nodded. “Let’s assume that on the surface, they don’t know this base exists. Then we pop out of the ground. How do we explain that?”

“Isn’t that the least of our worries?” Rossetti asked. “After all, we don’t even know if the map is accurate, if the corridors have fallen in, and if the exits still exist.”

“We don’t know if Venice City still exists,” the woman scientist said.

Coop shuddered at that thought. Maybe the old-timers had been right. Maybe they should have been careful about how they named their city. They had named it Venice City because the Earth city had been built on canals. But it had eventually disappeared under the water.

What if this Venice had disappeared as well?

“The history still might be there,” Coop said. “It might help us refine the timeline, if nothing else.”

“We’re going to be here for a long time, aren’t we, sir?” That was Shärf, who hadn’t spoken up at all until now.

Coop looked at him. Unlike Dix, Shärf didn’t seem panicked. In fact, it seemed to Coop like Shärf had asked the question not for himself, but for the other people in the room, as if he was trying to prepare them for the inevitable.

“There’s that possibility,” Coop said. “But we knew that before we landed. Even if the sector base were here and running the way it had been a month ago, we still would have been here a long time. We sustained a lot of damage. We need to do the repairs. We have the time to figure this out.”

As he said the sentence, he felt the irony of the word “time.” They had a long adventure ahead of them, whether they were two hundred years behind the Fleet or five hundred years.

The emergency that he’d been feeling since the attack of the Quurzod more than two weeks ago had coalesced into something else. A situation, a crisis. But a slow-moving one.

One that would take patience and effort and a lot of hard work to resolve.

He would have preferred a fight to the death.

But he didn’t have that. Instead, he had to rely on his specialists.

He stood behind his chair and gripped its back. Then he looked at everyone, taking the time to meet everyone’s eyes before he spoke.

He wasn’t quite sure what he would say. He knew he had to reassure them. He also knew that he needed to set up a plan so that they could all move forward.

He couldn’t make that plan with a committee. He had to figure it out on his own.

He nodded at them, silently acknowledging what they all knew. Things had changed, and it would take a little while to get used to that change.

“Thank you all for the work,” he said. “You’ll have new orders tomorrow. We’re going to figure out exactly when we are. But know this: we’ll be all right.”

He sounded confident even though he didn’t feel confident. He felt as if someone had shut off the ship’s gravity and he was floating, unfettered, in a world he thought he knew.

The others, though, seemed calmer. Maybe it was the shared knowledge. Maybe it was the fact that they were not in charge of it; he was, and as their commander, he was the one who needed to solve the problem.

But he knew, as a commander—as a human being—that some problems had no easy solution.

And this problem was one of those.

* * * *