City of Ruins

FORTY-ONE



Coop stood in the center of the captain’s suite, hands clasped behind his back, studying the walls. He had the screens on. He was staring at images of foldspace.

The captains’ suites in all of the Fleet vessels were located in the same place and had the same basic structure. Five rooms, including private galley. The suite also had a full kitchen plus dining area that had doors that closed it off from the rest of the suite. The head chef used the full kitchen to prepare meals for the captain’s private guests whenever he chose to have a dinner party. He didn’t do that often, so that part of the suite rarely got used.

He’d learned to cook while in school and usually made his own meals in the private galley. One of those meals cooled on the table behind him. He didn’t feel like eating, but he knew he had to just so that he could keep up his strength.

The living area smelled of roast beef. The beef was not really beef; it was something that the chef had found on Ukhanda that approximated beef, but cooked properly, it tasted of beef, something Coop usually loved.

He had made a meal that he usually couldn’t ignore, and here he was ignoring it.

That showed, even to him, the level of his distress.

He sighed and made himself turn his back on the wall screens, if only for a moment. He was as shaken as his crew at this news-—which, he had admonished them, they couldn’t tell anyone else. Not yet.

Five hundred years in his own future, a thousand.

He sat at the table and listened to the chair squeak beneath him. He picked up his fork and stared at the beef. Potatoes—real potatoes, grown in the hydroponic garden on board the ship, along with three varieties of lettuce for his salad, and the carrots he had cooked with the roast. A small bowl of strawberry compote waited for him to finish the main course.

He twirled the fork. He had no appetite. This had happened to him before, when he knew he had to divorce Mae. As his mind had accepted the new reality, his stomach twisted in knots and refused sustenance, as well as sleep.

He’d been finishing his captain’s training at the time. His instructors figured out what was wrong and forced him to eat.

A captain of a flagship vessel in the Fleet couldn’t afford human weakness. He couldn’t afford to lose his appetite. He couldn’t afford to lose sleep.

He couldn’t afford to collapse.

Coop ate a bite of the beef. The gravy coating it had the proper amount of richness, just a hint of exotic spice from a community that the Ivoire had visited during the first year of his command.

The memory made him smile for just a moment, until another thought collided with it.

That community was gone. Changed. Different. Even if he went back (and he wouldn’t have; the Fleet never went back), he wouldn’t find the couple who had taught him how to grow that spice and helped him transplant the tiny seedlings into a pot to take with him to the hydroponic garden where, it turned out, the botanists had already taken some of the same plants.

He chewed, swallowed. Took another bite. Tried to swallow past the knot in his throat.

Nothing in those images of foldspace told him how the Ivoire had gotten here. For two weeks, he had looked at the unfamiliar stars, the strange ridges of light, the area of space that had defied matching a star map, and he had figured out nothing then.

He figured out nothing now.

Coop took another bite: potatoes this time. Carrots, roasted. Beef again. Chew. Swallow. Try not to think about the lump in the throat.

After a century or two of separation, he wouldn’t be able to use the math to catch the Fleet. He would have to use investigation, cunning, and research.

He and his team would have to estimate where the Fleet might have been, then use the anacapa to get there. And that first trip with the anacapa drive, after this one, would be scary enough. If they overshot, if they miscalculated, they would have to work their way backward.

And how would they know if they miscalculated?

They would have to ask. They would have to research. They would have to look on the nearby planets themselves, going into various communities. The ship would become one gigantic investigative team that searched for word of the Fleet.

Once they found word of it, they’d move forward on the trajectory, stopping often, asking again, searching for word of the Fleet, looking at timelines, listening to memories, figuring out when (if) his people had passed through.

He might spend the rest of his life searching for the Fleet.

He set the fork down and rubbed his eyes, then blinked just for a moment. Made himself swallow, breathe. He had to stay calm, not just for himself, but for his entire ship.

He stood and walked back to the screens. With one quick verbal command, he changed the image from foldspace to the abandoned sector base.

It was still empty. The equipment still looked abandoned. The occasional unbonded nanobit floated by.

In his lifetime six ships had disappeared from the Fleet, maybe forever.

In his father’s lifetime, ten.

In his grandfather’s, none at all.

It simply depended on events, on the uses of the anacapa.

Although in his grandfather’s lifetime, six ships had been destroyed by one form of disaster or another without once using the anacapa. Enemy fire, malfunctioning equipment. Coop’s grandfather spent half of his life going back and forth between sector bases as the Fleet got repaired and upgraded for the hundredth, maybe thousandth time in its existence.

From some people’s perspective, from the perspective of Dix’s chef, for example, the Ivoire would be lost. If, indeed, the information that Coop had was correct. He would rejoin the Fleet and there would be new commanders, new crews, new everything.

Except a new mission.

He sighed and stared at the empty base before him. The lighting was dim. The emptiness continued into the darkness as far as the eye could see.

When he had last left here, he’d had an imagined future, one that consisted of some kind of variation of the life he’d led, going from place to place with the Fleet, remaining in his place within the generations, with the people he knew.

An imagined future that he didn’t know-—and they didn’t know—was completely wrong. Because no matter what happened now, his future was not as he had planned it.

Unless he became very, very lucky, he would never again see anyone he knew, except for the crew of this ship. Everyone else would be gone by the time he caught the Fleet. If he never caught the Fleet—if his son or his son’s sons caught the Fleet (if he had children at all, now)—then he would spend his life chasing what amounted to a phantom.

A phantom Fleet of ghost ships, once filled with his friends and colleagues. And cousins and aunts and uncles.

He brought his head down. No wonder he was shaken. No wonder he had trouble putting this aside.

Many of the people he knew were effectively dead to him. The life he had was gone.

His imagined future could never, ever happen.

He was now the top of the heap. His people would listen to him and would have no other authority to appeal to. He was not only the oldest person in his family; he was the only person in his family.

And he had to be strong.

He had to figure out a way to keep his people together, keep them from falling apart.

He had to manage them and his own mind.

His own heart.

He turned away from the screens, turning them off. He returned to his plate. The gravy had congealed just a bit, but no matter.

Maybe once the Ivoire was repaired and had left this place, he could take a few days, talk to one of the counselors, let himself feel the crisis.

He had no time to do that now.

But he would continue to eat dinner alone, so no one knew how very hard this all was.

Especially on him.

* * * *