City of Ruins

FIFTY-EIGHT



Five thousand years. The woman who wouldn’t tell him her real name kept saying five thousand years.

The woman watched him, concern on her face. Coop had a hunch she understood more than she was saying. Al-Nasir had his hands clasped, his forehead creased with worry.

And Perkins fidgeted beneath the table, having as much difficulty as Coop, but in a different area. She believed the number.

He did not.

Five thousand years just wasn’t possible. At least that was what his logical brain told him.

But his subconscious kept whispering that five thousand years was possible. The anacapa could have malfunctioned badly. No one knew exactly where it would take people when it did malfunction. That was the danger of the Fleet vessels.

Coop shook his head slightly, banishing that thought which snuck into his mind. He wasn’t going to deal with that, not now.

He had another problem to deal with first.

“She keeps saying the same phrase over and over,” he said to Perkins. “You’re translating that as five thousand years. Are you sure you’re right?”

She looked at him. The terror in her eyes was answer enough. But she said through her comm link, “Please check that phrase through the system again.”

Coop had already told the linguists this conversation would have to remain secret. But he wasn’t sure about something this big. It would be hard for anyone to keep it secret.

If the translation was right.

“It’s a fairly simple phrase,” the lieutenant said. “And their word for ‘thousand’ is remarkably similar to our word.”

“You told me that similar words could make people misunderstand languages. It’s a common mistake, you said.”

She nodded. “I’m not sure how to check this.”

He knew how to check it. The woman and Al-Nasir were watching closely. Coop picked up a pad from the sideboard and typed in the number: 5,000.

Then he slid the pad to the woman. “Is this the number?”

She bit her lower lip, then looked up at him. He knew the answer before she spoke.

“Yes.”

He ran a hand over his face. Five thousand years was impossible. Five thousand years forward. The Fleet might not exist anymore. She said it was a legend, that they had only found ships without their crew, long empty.

Not abandoned. Maybe no longer useful.

Maybe no longer in use at all.

He stood up, clasped his hands behind his back, not so much to prevent them from shaking—although he needed to do that as well—but to make sure he stayed calm.

Five thousand years.

He took a deep breath. He couldn’t settle the conundrum of five thousand years right now. But he still had a few questions for the woman.

He turned. She was watching him, her body tense. She clearly wasn’t afraid of him, but it was also clear that she wanted to be prepared for anything.

“Why were you here?” he asked. “What made you come to the sector base?”

Perkins had to translate. She seemed relieved to be talking again.

The woman said, “It’s complicated. The short version is that we came because of the stealth technology.”

“Are you sure you got that right?” he asked Perkins. “Did she say stealth technology?”

“Yes,” Perkins said.

“Ask her to explain,” he said.

The woman talked for a moment, waving her hands, indicating the ship itself. Coop silently cursed his lack of understanding. The language barrier was worse than he expected, but why wouldn’t it be, with five thousand years between him and this woman? It was amazing they could talk at all.

“I think I have this right,” Perkins said to him when the woman was finished. “The old Fleet ships that she has found give off an energy signature that they call stealth technology. They call it that because they believe it’s a cloaking device that the Dignity Vessels have.”

“The anacapa,” he said softly.

Perkins nodded. “I think so. She says that it was unusual to find the signature underground, but they came down to investigate, and found the room.”

“Does she live in Venice City?”

“No,” Perkins said.

“So what brought her here?” Coop asked. “How did she even know the signature existed? And why now? If it’s the anacapa, the signature has been here for five thousand years.”

Perkins repeated the question. The woman looked nervous for a moment. She glanced at Al-Nasir as if silently asking him a question. He shrugged.

The woman was clearly deciding what to tell Coop, and she was making that decision on her own.

“What remains of the stealth technology is malfunctioning,” she said so slowly that Perkins was able to simultaneously translate. “The malfunctions are not as big a problem in space because a person actually has to go into an empty Dignity Vessel to encounter it. But here, in Vaycehn, the stealth technology is causing something the locals call ‘death holes.’”

“Death holes,” Coop said to Perkins. “That’s the phrase? You’re certain?”

Perkins nodded, then asked the woman to clarify. This time, the woman spoke for a moment before Perkins translated.

“As best I can understand it,” Perkins said, “something goes wrong, and a wave of energy explodes out of the base, blowing a hole in the surface. Then the nanobits coat that hole, and a new part of what she calls the caves are formed. The problem is that no one on the surface knows when or where a death hole will happen. Holes just open up and suck people and buildings into them.”

“My God.” Coop understood the phenomenon the woman described. It was the way the base got built. The base engineers would pick a spot, then start the nanoprocess on the surface, guiding it with their equipment and burrowing into the ground or a mountainside or wherever the base was supposed to go. Then the nanobits would coat the surface, so that nothing could leak or fall or create problems.

The system was supposed to remain self-repairing, even after the shutdown, so no one could get trapped in the base. But it wasn’t supposed to malfunction. It wasn’t supposed to do this.

“How long has this been going on?” he asked.

The woman shrugged. “Throughout Vaycehn’s known history.”

Someone shut down the base wrong, or something went awry and never got fixed. He should have been horrified—maybe he was, beneath it all, beneath the shock of five thousand years—but he was actually a bit relieved.

“We can fix this,” he said to the woman.

“Good,” she said, and he actually understood that word. Then she spoke a bit longer, and Perkins had to translate. “Do you mean you can stop the problems here on Vaycehn or can you help us with the malfunctioning Dignity Vessels as well?”

Dignity Vessel. That term still startled him. “One problem at a time. We can stop the death holes.”

“Then you need to know something else,” the woman said through Perkins. “The worst death hole in centuries happened when your ship appeared.”

He frowned. That made things more complicated. The problem was tied to the anacapa, as he had thought initially.

“My engineers will need to see this, and all the records,” he said. That would also get his people on the surface, gathering history so that they could figure out what exactly happened to Venice City.

“There’s one more problem,” she said. “The people of Vaycehn don’t know that you’re here.”

Something in her voice made him stop. He looked at her, really looked at her. She was worried now, maybe even frightened.

“Why don’t they know about us?” he asked.

She glanced at Al-Nasir. He was biting his lower lip so hard that it was starting to bleed. Something was going on here, something Coop didn’t understand.

“We’re a group of scientists, explorers, and academics,” the woman said. “We’re here to study the phenomenon. You were a surprise.”

“Clearly,” Coop said.

“Politically, this is all complicated,” she said.

He shrugged. “Why should that matter to me?”

“It shouldn’t, I guess,” she said. “You can come and go as you please. But I would request that you don’t leave until we figure out how to solve the death hole problem.”

Coop nodded. “We will,” he said. “It won’t take much to fix it.”

“Good.” She sighed. “Otherwise, the minute you leave, more people will die up there.”

“That seems to make it more imperative that they learn about us,” he said. “They’ll know that their long-standing problem will be solved.”

“But it will create a new one,” she said, “one that might cost infinitely more life.”

He sat back down and waited for her to explain.

* * * *