City of Ruins

FIFTY-SEVEN

I feel like an idiot. Ilona and the historians convinced me to dress as if I were meeting with the head of the Vaycehnese government, which I have. I brought one very dressy outfit (which, honestly, is all I own), for just that sort of meeting, and now I’m wearing it in the room I should be exploring.

I miss my environmental suit. I feel more like myself when I wear that.

I’m not carrying my laser pistol, although we discussed it. I don’t want to go into this meeting armed. Al-Nasir and I are already outnumbered just by the lieutenant and her people. If there are more—and there is at least one, this mysterious captain—then we’re seriously outnumbered.

A laser pistol won’t save me.

I am, however, carrying Karl’s knife. It’s strapped around my waist. I doubt they’ll let me bring it inside the ship, but I’m going to try. I’m going to tell them it’s ceremonial, which it is. I keep the knife close, for sentimental reasons and as a reminder that things can go wrong.

We’re inside the room. The others are going to wait. Seager and Quinte will guard the door. They’re to leave as quickly as they can if it looks like thing: have gone badly. Rea, DeVries, and Kersting will continue our not-so-great investigation of the room. I’m sure they’ll attract minders, and that’s all right



Al-Nasir stands beside me. He keeps rubbing the palms of his hands together. He’s afraid he’ll screw up the translations. I figure if the conversation doesn’t seem to be going well, I’m going to leave. The Dignity Vessel people can try to stop me if they want to. But I’ve asked for respect, and I’m going to continue to demand it.

I wish we had a translation program, too, but my people couldn’t put one together yet. I’m rather astonished that the Dignity Vessel people have. Stone believes—and I actually agree—that this is a sign of a full complement of crew on the ship itself. If five people work on something, they, by definition work slower than fifty. A group doesn’t have downtime. They can work more efficiently.

The ship’s door opens as we approach. The staircase lowers, and then two men in those black uniforms emerge. They walk to the base of the stairs and move to the side. Either they’re going to guard the ship or they’re going to escort us.

They each extend a hand. The person on the right extends his right hand and the person on the left extends his left. It’s choreographed, formal, and immediately sets a tone.

Ilona was right to make me dress up—much as I hate it.

“You ready?” I ask Al-Nasir.

He nods, then takes a deep breath and squares his shoulders. We head into the ship, me first.

We’d argued about that. Everyone wanted me to go second, as if that makes a difference. If something goes wrong, I’m going to be in the same amount of trouble whether I hit the danger first or I hit it second.

Besides, my going first shows leadership, and that’s what I need to do here.

As I put my foot on the first stair, my heart rate increases. I am going inside a working Dignity Vessel.

The first time I went inside one, I had to lower myself through a hatch, with all of my suit lights on. I felt like a tourist then, nervous on her first dive, and Squishy warned me that I’d get the gids.

She was right.

If I were wearing a suit, I’d have the gids now.

I step inside the door into the airlock. It’s familiar and unfamiliar. We have this part of the ship on two different Dignity Vessels, but neither of those vessels work. Here there are lights in places I don’t expect them, circular lights on either side that are clearly assessing me and the kind of threat I pose.

Al-Nasir comes up beside me, and as he does, the door closes. The lights grow brighter.

The interior door opens, revealing a bright corridor and the lieutenant, standing just inside it. She’s wearing her black uniform, her hands clasped behind her back.

She’s nervous, too.

With the lights on and the environmental system working, the corridor seems bigger than it actually is. This one now holds me, Al-Nasir, the lieutenant, and two guards.

“Welcome,” she says, speaking a Standard so clear that it startles me.

“Thank you,” I say.

She smiles. “Please come with me.”

She’s practiced this part. That’s all right. I’ve practiced a few phrases too. I hope I can pull it off.

We walk too quickly through the corridor. I want to go slowly, like we would if we were diving.

I want to mark each intersection, take note of every turn. I want to examine doorways and the ceiling, and figure out exactly what the glowing panels are.

Our feet tap against the floor. The sound seems odd, dampened somehow, not at all what I’m used to when I go into one of the Dignity Vessels.

We go up two levels. I make a map in my head, compare it to what I know. We’re heading toward the cockpit, but I have a hunch we’re not going there. We’re going to one of two large rooms that I believe to be conference rooms. One is just off the cockpit, and I can’t imagine a captain bringing strangers there.

The other is one level down, and several meters away. That’s the one I would use, and as we turn right, that’s the one we’re headed to.

I don’t say anything. I’m too busy looking at things—the black walls, just like the walls in the caves; the writing that is missing in my Dignity Vessels; and the cleanliness that comes from constant maintenance.

None of the ships we’ve found have these smooth black walls. I suspect that beneath them is the gray metal we’re used to, with the rivets and the welded parts. This blackness is something new, or it’s something that doesn’t last when a ship loses power for centuries.

We reach the door to the conference room. The door is closed. There are no guards outside it.

The lieutenant stops and looks at me.

“The captain wants to have only four of us inside,” she says slowly.

“All right,” I say.

Then she swings the door open and waits until we go in.

I step in first.

The room is nothing like I imagined it to be. Only the dimensions remain the same as the rooms I’ve seen in the other two Dignity Vessels.

This room has a table down the center, so well polished that I can see my own reflection. A dozen chairs are bolted to the floor, and there are actual sideboards. The walls show an unfamiliar skyscape, but that’s no painting. It’s a recorded image being shown on the screens that encase us.

A man stands at the head of the table. He’s surprisingly tall and broad shouldered, with dark hair that touches his collar. His eyes are blue, his features sharp.

He doesn’t have the thinness of someone raised in space. He’s muscular with strong bones, certainly not something I would have expected, even though the lieutenant doesn’t look space-raised either.

He bows slightly to me. “Welcome,” he says in Standard, mangling the word so badly that I almost don’t recognize it.

“Thank you,” I say in his language. I’m probably mangling that phrase as badly as he mangled “Welcome,” but I don’t mind. The phrase brings a smile to his face, one that softens his features.

He greets Al-Nasir personally, and Al-Nasir answers. Then the captain offers us refreshments from the sideboard. There are baked goods I do not recognize, carafes of something that looks like wine, and a variety of fruits and cold vegetables.

He lets one of his hands linger near a carafe. I nod. He picks up a glass, pours an amber liquid for me, another for Al-Nasir, and hands them to us. Then he pours two more, one for himself and one for the lieutenant.

Apparently the polite customs are the same in both of our cultures.

He indicates the chairs near the table. The lieutenant sits, then looks pointedly at Al-Nasir. He sits near her.

The captain stands near the head of the table. He says very slowly, “My name is Jonathon Cooper. I am captain of this ship. People call me Coop.”

His nickname. “Coop,” I say, careful to pronounce it the same way. “People call me Boss.”

He pulls out his chair and sits. I sit at the same time, taking the chair to his right.

“Boss,” he says as he sits. “Lieutenant—” And then he says that word I can’t quite understand, clearly her name. “—is not sure Boss is your name or your title.”

“Both,” I say.

He doesn’t understand that, but she does. She repeats it to him.

He replies in his own language and looks at me. I don’t understand a word, but she is able to translate.

“They call you by your title?”

“I prefer it,” I say.

The conversation is slow as the translations go back and forth, but it feels right, as if he and I are actually talking. I glance at Al-Nasir. He nods. He’s understanding us both so far.

The captain says through the lieutenant’s translation, “Surely you understand my position. As commander of this ship, I cannot call someone else Boss.”

I shrug. I expected this. “Then call me what you will.”

His lips twist into a slight smile, and the game is on. He now knows I’m only going to tell him what I want to tell him and nothing more.

“Fahd Al-Nasir will do his best to translate for me,” I say.

No one has said anything about my knife, which surprises me.

“I have a team of linguists monitoring the conversation,” the captain says. “They might be able to assist if we need it.”

“A team of linguists,” I say. “I am impressed. How large is your crew?”

“Five hundred strong,” he says.

Five hundred. The number staggers me.

“We guessed perhaps a hundred,” I say.

“You’ve never encountered one of our ships before?” he asks.

I’m going to be as honest as I can with him, unless I believe some of the information is not to our advantage. “Not a working vessel,” I say.

He frowns. That answer clearly disturbs him. “How many of our ships have you encountered that don’t work?”

“Five,” I say.

“Five,” he repeats, then holds out his open hand. “Five?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Do they have any crew?” he asks.

I study him for a moment. He expects Dignity Vessels to have a crew. I expect them to be abandoned and ruined. Something is quite off here.

“No,” I say. “They have all been abandoned.”

The lieutenant touches her ear. She repeats my word again. Clearly the linguists are working on it.

“They’re empty,” I say to him. “The ones I find are derelicts.”

The lieutenant looks at me, her face a little slack, not from the linguists nattering in her ear, but from my words.

“Empty,” she repeats. “Destroyed?”

“A couple of them,” I say. “I don’t know if they were ruined by time or by some kind of battle.”

“You found them all in the same area of space?” she asks, her Standard fluid.

“No,” I say.

She looks away from me, blinks hard, and frowns. The captain says her name sharply. She nods but doesn’t look at him. Then she swallows visibly.

My words have disturbed her.

The captain asks her something in their language. Al-Nasir answers, slowly, trying to translate my words.

The lieutenant raises her hand, as if asking for a moment. Her palm is shaking.

She then turns to the captain and speaks rapidly. Al-Nasir leans forward as if he’s trying to understand.

The captain’s frown deepens, and he looks at me. He says something to the lieutenant, clearly meaning for her to translate.

“How long abandoned?” she asks.

“We don’t know exactly,” I say.

She repeats this. The captain speaks. She translates: “You have a guess.”

I shrug a shoulder. This seems momentous to them.

“Please,” he says to me in Standard. “Please.”

That moves me more than I expect. Beneath this show of diplomatic courtesy, beneath the rigid military behavior, beneath the patience of the past two weeks lives panic.

I have just tapped into it.

And I think I’m about to make it worse.

“My guess is based on what little we know about Dignity Vessels,” I say. “We believe they’re legend. Myth.”

The lieutenant translates. The captain looks surprised. He narrows his eyes and looks at me. Then he nods, asking me to continue.

Maybe the mood in the room is catching, because I’m suddenly nervous. “The ships we’ve found are at least five thousand years old.”

The lieutenant doesn’t translate. She tilts her head and looks at me as if I’m crazy. I feel crazy.

“I know it sounds impossible,” I say. “We have no evidence that the Dignity Vessels could travel more than fifty light-years from Earth. But clearly you’re here, and they got here, and something enabled you to get here. But we’ve done studies on all of the ships we’ve found—not just us, but the Empire, too, and we know those ships are at least five thousand years old, maybe older.”

She still doesn’t translate. Her mouth is open slightly.

The captain says her name. She doesn’t respond. He says her name again, then touches her shoulder. He says something else.

Al-Nasir leans into me. “He’s asking her if she needs to leave, if they need to bring in someone else.”

She’s shaking her head. She rubs a hand over her mouth, squares her shoulders just like Al-Nasir did before we got on the ship, and then she speaks for several minutes to the captain.

He repeats a phrase a couple times. I don’t need Al-Nasir to tell me that the captain is asking about my numbers, about that five thousand years.

He turns to me, his lips thin, his eyes steely. He’s not angry. He’s not upset like the lieutenant is. But he’s disturbed and trying to hide it.

He asks something with a great deal of intensity, the words sharp and hard.

“How long has this base been empty?” the lieutenant asks slowly, as if she’s afraid of my answer.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“What do they say in—?” and then she uses a phrase I’ve never heard. Before I can ask her to clarify, Al-Nasir says, “Vaycehn. She’s asking about Vaycehn.”

“What do they say about the base in Vaycehn?” I ask. “They have no idea it’s here.”

The captain speaks without her. “You know.”

I understand him. He’s not commenting. He’s asking. How did I know the base was here?

I try to think of a way to answer him, one that will be understandable without a lot of explaining in languages neither of us completely understand.

“We didn’t know,” I say. “This place surprised us.”

That much is true. I brace myself for the next question, trying to figure out how to explain energy signatures and death holes and all of those problems in a way that the lieutenant and those unseen linguists could understand.

The captain asks his question, and the lieutenant translates.

“How long has—Vaa-zen—been here?” she asks, mispronouncing Vaycehn.

“Here?” I ask. “On Wyr? This planet?”

She nods.

“It’s the oldest city in the sector,” I say, stalling because I know instinctively that he’s not going to like the answer. “Vaycehn has been here more than five thousand years.”

* * * *