City of Ruins

THIRTY-NINE



The rock pile grows smaller, and as it does, I realize something.

The dust pile is growing smaller as well.

The floor has absorbed the dust.

Now my questions become urgent. I want to ask Paplas how this functions. I want to know the answer immediately. It’s one of the stranger things I’ve seen—and I’ve seen a lot of strange things.

But I cannot ask, and Bridge looks too frightened and too confused to know that these questions might be important. I can’t even tap Bridge, like I had planned, and whisper a question to him. With his left hand, he clutches his ear protector as if he wants to pull it off. His other hand squeezes his knee.

Paplas grins as he moves forward. He loves this job, working alone, underground, using his gigantic machine to crush rock.

I can empathize. I love working alone as well, and I’d probably be just as annoying with strangers in my ship as he has been with us.

It’s a way of maintaining distance.

I grip the seat in front of me with one hand, wishing I could move up front. I want to watch the procedure. I want to see what the equipment’s control panel says, even though I really don’t understand Vaycehnese.

I’m fascinated and a bit worried about the vibration and the rock walls, although it seems to make no difference to Paplas at all.

It takes less than an hour to work our way to the crushed hovercart. All that rock, gone. The Bug slows as it reaches the back end of the hovercart, and those big legs move almost daintily across its back.

They take rocks and move them a few meters away, then pulverize them, takes me a moment to realize that Paplas is trying to protect the hovercart.

Does he think there are bodies inside?

I want to tell him that there aren’t, but I don’t. His admonition against me was strong enough that I don’t want to put my presence here in jeopardy.

Instead, I watch the deliberate movements he uses to get each rock out of the cart itself. Within fifteen minutes, the back end is clear. Then the front, with the controls.

Oddly, the seats are relatively undamaged. The benefit of a cart, I guess. It just filled with rock. I can’t see well enough to know if the floor of the cart is all right, but it just might be.

The Bug carefully lifts the rocks off the front end. Each rock seems larger than the last.

I finally understand why the cart is bent at an upward angle. The rocks almost flattened the very front part of the hovercart. Had anyone been standing there, they would have been crushed.

I shudder. My people faced this, without me. We were somehow protected in that room.

I would rather die in the vastness of space, slowly freezing to death, unable to breathe as my environmental suit shuts down (or gets breached) than I would being crushed by a load of rocks in an underground cave.

No wonder some of my people looked at me with great hesitation when I said we needed to get back down here quickly. They have vivid imaginations. They know that they could die like this, that the ground around us is horribly unstable, and that it’s worse inside these caves.

They know it and they don’t want to come back down.

Is it fair to ask my team to come with me?

I’m not sure on that.

Fortunately I have some time to think about it. Although I have less time than I originally thought.

Paplas finishes digging out the corridors with surprising speed. When he’s done, he says nothing to us. He does pull off his ear protectors. Then he rapidly rotates the pod 120 degrees, so that we’re now facing the way that we came into the corridor.

Then he marches the Bug forward, as if we’re late to an appointment.

Bridge clutches his ear protectors, uncertain whether or not to remove them. I pull mine off.

Suddenly, noise fills the little pod. The grinding gears, the thudding from the massive feet, a humming sound, probably caused by our proximity to the stealth tech—something I had forgotten to warn Paplas about.

My heart rate surges, and for a moment, I feel guilty. I have been so absorbed in the process that I have forgotten the real danger.

But Paplas has that map, and the area just beyond that last rock fall is marked in black. I finally realize what the map is. It is a map of the areas inside the caves where people have died mysteriously.

Bridge leans forward. “Can we take off our ear protectors?” he says, just a little too loudly.

“Why not?” Paplas says, as if the very question is ridiculous.

Bridge whips his off and juts them forward, as if he expects Paplas to take them from him.

“Hang onto them,” Paplas says, his hands busy with the controls. The Bug hasn’t moved this fast since we got below ground. In fact, I didn’t know it could move this fast.

Bridge hangs the ear protectors over his right knee. Then he rubs his ears with the flat of his hands, an expression of distaste on his face. I understand what he’s done; my ears feel a bit slimy as well. But I’ll wait to wash them when we get back to the hotel.

Apparently Bridge can’t wait.

I lean into him and say as softly as I can, “Ask what happens to the pulverized rock.”

Paplas tilts his head. He’s heard me. But stubborn creature that he is, he doesn’t answer me. He waits until Bridge repeats the question.

“The dust vanishes,” Paplas says. “The rocks would eventually vanish too if we just left them there. The piles were probably smaller this morning than they were last night.”

Now Bridge is interested. He has forgotten the slimy feeling of his ears. The fingers of his right hand close around the ear protectors—probably unconsciously—as he leans forward just a bit.

“How does that work?” he asks.

“No one knows,” Paplas says. “It is as mysterious as the black walls. Many of our scientists believe that the pulverized rock becomes fuel for the black coating, but they do not know where the coating comes from, or where the rock gets stored since it is rarely used immediately.”

“So rock falls always go away?” Bridge asks.

“If we wait long enough,” Paplas says. “The corridors are always open.”

Bridge and I exchange glances.

“So you just developed this machine to hurry the process along?” Bridge asks.

“We developed the machine for above ground,” Paplas says. “And to rescue people trapped below mountains of rubble. Sometimes you cannot wait.”

There’s a bit of judgment in his tone, as if we should have thought of that. I remember his caution on the hovercart. I wonder if anyone told him it was there. If not, he was probably angry when he came upon it, thinking that there might be dead people inside, people he could have saved.

I keep my word, however. I remain silent.

“Have you ever wondered what created these caves?” Bridge asks. “Have you ever wondered what keeps them running?”

“No,” Paplas says so quickly and so curtly that it’s clear he’s lying. “I have never thought of it at all.”

* * * *