City of Ruins

FORTY-EIGHT



Coop stood as the door to the repair room opened. Everyone on the bridge turned toward the screens. Even Dix looked up, and Dix hadn’t looked at much of anything in days.

The outsider woman stopped when she saw the lights. They glistened off her hair, a chestnut brown that surprised Coop. She wasn’t wearing a helmet, but she was wearing a mask of some kind over her mouth and nose. The particles worried her.

For some reason, that reassured him. These people weren’t that different after all.

As she looked at the lights, she drew her weapon—not that silly knife, which he couldn’t even see. From this distance, the weapon looked like some kind of laser pistol, but bulkier than he expected.

“Zoom in on that weapon,” Coop said to Anita. “See if we can figure out exactly what it is and does.”

“I don’t blame her for drawing it,” Perkins said. “She doesn’t know—”

“I don’t blame her either, Lieutenant,” Coop said. “Let’s just watch and figure out what they’re going to do.”

“Can’t I suit up?” Perkins asked.

He glanced at her. She had turned toward him, her back straight, her eyes glistening. She wanted to go into the repair room.

And she was right; she was the one who should go out there. He had said first-contact situation, which meant the linguists were in the main team, and Mae, his best linguist, wasn’t on rotation.

“Yes,” he said to Perkins. “I want you in your dress uniform.”

“Sir?” She sounded surprised.

“And no weapons,” he said.

“But they have them,” she said.

“And I would too in this circumstance, if I were them. But we have the upper hand here. So let’s use it.” He turned his attention back to the screen.

All seven had come into the repair room, and they were using a flanking maneuver he hadn’t seen since military training. Half of the woman’s team wore the same kind of mask she did. The rest still had on their helmets, which had to limit visibility.

They all carried those laser pistols, and the hands of at least three of the seven shook as they clutched the grip.

Great. Amateurs. Frightened amateurs.

This could get dangerous.

He almost rescinded the order to Perkins, thinking he didn’t want his people in the middle of a group of scared amateurs. Then he changed his mind. The amateurs would be scared no matter what, and then, if his people didn’t appear, they’d get emboldened.

He needed to retain this upper hand.

“Dix,” Coop said, “I need Rossetti up here now.”

“Yes, sir,” Dix said.

“You’re sending them out immediately?” Yash asked.

Perkins shot her an almost angry glance, then hurried off the bridge, as her absence would prevent him from changing his mind.

“No,” Coop said. “I’m going to give the outsiders an hour. They need to regroup, think a bit, calm down. We surprised them. The last thing we should do is surprise them again.”

“I think you should observe more,” Yash said.

“Duly noted,” Coop said, closing debate. “What are those weapons, Anita?”

“Laser pistols,” she said. “They have the right power signature, but they’re pretty unwieldy. I wouldn’t want to fire one.”

“I assume they’ll do a lot of damage if they hit someone?” he asked.

“Can’t tell without actually test-firing one. But that’s a safe assumption.”

He watched the outsiders, slowly exploring the room, clearly responding to commands. The woman kept glancing at one of the screens; it seemed to make her nervous.

They all made Coop nervous. The screens were all tied to ships within the sector, and showed what the ships saw. But, logically, there shouldn’t be any ships in the sector. They should have left decades ago with the Fleet.

The visual that disturbed him the most was the one the woman kept glancing at-—three screens down, it looked as if he were looking at some kind of station, one he didn’t recognize.

Questions, questions, and more questions.

He hoped that once his people talked to the outsiders, he would finally start getting answers.

* * * *