City of Ruins

SIX



The problem is that of the people with the markers, I’m the only experienced diver. The others have had training, of course, or they wouldn’t have gone into the Room of Lost Souls when my father begged them to. But the Room is an empty place, without a lot of obvious dangers.

None of the Six have the ability to dive a dangerous area. None of them know how to do an excavation, and I wouldn’t trust any of them—no matter how smart—to attempt one even in full gravity.

By the time we have our nightly meeting, my mind is full of half-completed plans. I don’t tell the others what I’m thinking; it’s too early. But I have a hunch we’ll be here quite a while, excavating the areas where the archeologists died.

I also have to set up an emergency evacuation plan. The longer we’re here, the more risk we run of getting discovered by the Empire. I talk to Ilona before we start the meeting. I have her lay out plans for a quick escape.

Essentially everyone must head for the ships in the spaceport as quickly as possible. We’ll decide at the time (if there’s time) which equipment to take and which we trash. And Ilona and I must drum it into everyone’s brains that if an emergency evacuation gets called, we all leave immediately, no matter what we’re doing.

“You think it’s stealth tech now, don’t you?” Ilona says as we finish moving chairs in the conference room.

The hotel staff has covered the table with specialty dishes as well as fresh fruit, vegetables, and crudites. We are going to eat a Vaycehnese feast, something the city is famous for. Glasses of sparkling water line the sideboard behind me.

I had the staff remove the wine the moment I arrived. I left all the beverages with caffeine and a single jug of local ale for the team members who cannot survive without their evening alcohol. But I make sure there isn’t enough for anyone to get drunk on.

I wanted to limit the food, too—overeating is just as bad when you’re trying to do something athletic—but I couldn’t do that without mining the feast. I have to trust my team to have some sense.

Ilona grabs one of the yellow-and-brown spotted apples that Vaycehn is known for, then sits on a chair near the head of the table.

“Well?” she says to me. “Are you convinced?”

“Let’s say I’m more convinced than I was,” I say. “There are a lot of strange things in those caves.”

“Not all strange things in the universe come from stealth tech.” Roderick has just come in the door. He stops when he sees the food spread as if he hasn’t eaten in weeks.

“I know that,” Ilona says with irritation. “But these are probably caused by it.”

“Probably not,” I say.

They both turn toward me.

I smile and grab one of the spotted apples for myself. “But we are going to wait for the others before I tell you what we found.”

The remaining members of the team straggle in. To my surprise, my team arrives before all the other teams are complete. My team looks tired— Carmak in particular, even though she didn’t do much physical work—and a few have wet hair from showers.

Ivy’s hands are scrubbed raw. I didn’t realize how upset she is from that simple touch. I would think that an archeologist, used to working in soil, would be used to touching strange and possibly dangerous things.

She sits across from Ilona. As the rest of the team filters in, they grab fruit or a slice of bread. A few pour themselves ale—although none of the ale drinkers are my divers or pilots. They’re used to remaining clean during a mission.

The drinkers are primarily the Six, the historians, and a few of the scientists. I’m glad I’ve left only one jug of ale because it’s gone quickly. Rollo Kersting, one of the Six, pours the last dregs into a coffee cup and turns to me.

“You should ask for more booze next time,” he says.

Mikk stifles a laugh. Roderick turns his chair away so that his grin isn’t apparent.

“I should,” I say in mock agreement.

Kersting’s name fits him. He is rounder than the others, although he manages to stay in shape. His chubby cheeks and tufts of brown hair accent the roundness. His love of beer is the reason for his extra weight. Much of what we do on missions with Kersting is designed to keep him from that extra glass with dinner.

Kersting doesn’t notice. He slides into the nearest chair and eyes the covered dishes.

“We have a lot to report,” I say. “The hotel has thoughtfully provided dinner. Let’s serve ourselves, and then conduct the meeting over food.”

I don’t have to tell people twice to grab plates. Fortunately the hotel was wise enough to repeat the same courses on both ends of the sideboard. Everyone dishes up platefuls of food, then returns to their seats. I take a small bit of each dish. Nothing is recognizable.

I set my plate in front of the head of the table, but I don’t eat. Everyone else tucks in.

I give the overall report of what’s below, spending quite a bit of time on the black walls and the strange lighting.

“I wasn’t able to see more than the first death area,” I say, “but it looks like the Vaycehnese haven’t let anyone back there. There’s a lot to be excavated.”

Tamaz lifts his head when he hears that. “We’re going to dive,” he says with a smile.

“We are,” I say. “But we’re going to run this like any other mission. Mapping first.”

“I would think there’s also a problem.” Kersting has finished his ale and taken a glass of sparkling water. “If the guide is right, then that stuff is in a stealth-tech area.”

“Possible,” I say. “It’s something we’re going to have to work out.”

Because if it all is truly in a stealth-tech area, then I’m the only trained diver. The Six will have to dive with me, and that will be like taking tourists on a dangerous deep-space dive.

“What I’m most interested in tonight are two things,” I say. “I want to know what the rest of you discovered in your researches today. And I also want to know if the scientists have any early thoughts on the black stuff. First the black stuff.”

Bridge glances at the other scientists. He’s the one who spent the most time with it today, the only one who could really postulate anything.

Still, I like the way he included the others, even if it was only with just a look.

“It’s really preliminary,” he says. “We took a lot of samples, not just from the chamber they took us into, but from the area around the top, any edge that we could find. Then I went deeper into the chamber, away from the collapsed area, as far back as the cart pilot would let me go without your approval, and took some samples there.”

“I’m assuming they’re different,” Stone says. A few of the others glare at her, but she ignores them. I may be in charge, but Stone is going to pretend she is.

“That’s the surprising thing,” Bridge says. “With a cursory analysis from the equipment we brought with us, they’re not. It’s the same material—and here’s the curious thing—it’s the same age.”

“Meaning what?” Mikk asks. He’s always the one who is the most impatient with science. He only wants to know how to use it, not what makes it work.

“I have no idea. I’m not even sure what we’re dealing with,” Bridge says. “The components are unbelievably small and not something we’ve seen before.”

“Infectious?” Ivy asks, rubbing her fingertips together.

Bridge gives her such a look of annoyance that I wonder if she’s been asking him that question all day. I don’t know why she’s so worried. She wore gloves.

“I don’t know if they’re infectious,” Bridge says. “Certainly not in the sense that we understand it. But something that small and powerful might do some harm if it gets into the lungs. I think until we know what we’re dealing with, we wear masks.”

“Lovely,” Stone mutters.

“Are the guides right?” I ask. “Is this a natural material?”

“Not on any world I’ve been to,” says Bridge. “I’m guessing and we’re going to have to do studies, but I’m pretty sure these are man-made.”

“That magically appear when a wall collapses?” Carmak asks. She seems to have perked up now that she’s eaten and had some coffee. She actually sounds intrigued now instead of overwhelmed like she had late this afternoon.

“Yes, possibly,” Bridge says. “They formed quickly, reinforced the collapsed walls, and created the shaft where there was none. And then there’s the matter of the lights.”

That catches my attention. The lights fascinated me from the moment we went below.

“What about them?” Stone asks.

“They form too. And they seem to respond to some kind of stimuli. In other words, they turn off when they’re not needed.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s a motion sensor of some kind,” I say. I explain what happened in the corridor.

“Built into that black stuff?” Mikk asks. “This stuff is sounding more and more amazing all the time.”

“Why shouldn’t it be?” Ilona says. “If the same people who built this built stealth tech, then of course this is amazing. Stealth tech is.”

“Amazing in how fast it kills,” Roderick says.

Both Mikk and Roderick, who saw a member of our team die in the Room of Lost Souls, loathe stealth tech. They’re here to conquer it, not learn everything they can about it.

“It’s amazing how it works,” Ilona says primly, as if she disapproves of their attitude.

I’m still not sure we’re dealing with stealth tech here, but I am sure that whoever made that black stuff had more scientific knowledge than we could pretend to have.

Since our science is the best it has been in thousands of years and we don’t understand this stuff, that means it’s ancient science. The ancients knew so much more than we ever will. I constantly find myself in awe of them.

“We’re here to find out whether or not those fourteen archeologists died in stealth-tech accidents,” I say. “Aside from my discovery today, did anyone learn more about that?”

“It’s hard to find information,” says Gregory, one of the scientists. His narrow face is wan, and I wonder if he’s getting much sleep. He doesn’t like travel, although he’ll do it when he has to. He’s always the last to volunteer for an away mission and the first to volunteer to go home.

“None of the officials want to talk to us.” He’s playing with his fork as he speaks, turning it upside down, banging the end, and then repeating the procedure. “They wouldn’t even point us to the scientific labs around here.”

One of the other scientists, a slightly overweight man named Lentz, nods. “I finally gave up and went to the universities. Vaycehn has three, and they’re all well known. I wasn’t allowed to contact any of the science departments directly, although in the cafeteria, I ran into a scientist I knew from a few conferences. He says they’d love to meet with us, but Vaycehn has regulations about sharing potentially difficult information with outsiders, and so in order to have a formal discussion, we’d have to spend months going through channels.”

“I hadn’t heard that part about channels until today,” Ilona says before I can ask her why we haven’t gotten all our permissions lined up.

“What does ‘potentially difficult’ mean?” Bridge asks.

Lentz smiles. “I asked that, too, and he answered me. Anything that could interfere with the tourist trade. The caves are the primary example because many of them are in the oldest areas of the city. People love to visit the ruins.”

“One-point-two million visitors a year,” says Gregory, “and those are the official ones.”

It seems he has gotten the tourist lecture too.

“We’d be considered unofficial, even though we have a guide. We’re not here on vacation.” Gregory sounds surprised at that, as if he doesn’t understand the limiting of the word “tourist” to vacationer alone.

“Was your friend able to tell you anything unofficial?” Bridge asks.

Lentz’s grin grew. “Well, two old friends, you know, we’ll talk about anything.”

My breath catches. Lentz got some information.

“And we did. We talked about our friends, our colleagues, our research.”

Stone sighs, as if she wants him to hurry to the point.

He leans back in the chair and puts his hands behind his head. “My friend is researching the death holes.”

Lentz has everyone’s attention now, and he seems to be enjoying it.

“It seems that the Boss’s guess was right. Others have died here, all through Vaycehn’s history. In fact, one of the reasons the city center moved so much was to avoid the holes.”

“There are that many?” Stone asks. “I thought there were only a few.”

“All through the city’s history,” Lentz says, “areas just collapse. It’s not the weight of buildings or the ground above that causes it—although sometimes that happens too. But there are entire death hole areas in the Basin. That’s why some of the ruins are off-limits to tourists, and that’s why some of the history of the city is vague.”

Bridge has steepled his fingers. I’m wishing I knew more detail about the five-thousand-year history of Vaycehn, like how often the city center moved and where.

“He thinks there’s a scientific reason for all of this?” Carmak asks. Her eyes are sparkling. She’s not the same woman who was in the field this afternoon. “Besides a geologic one, I mean. Because the histories say that Vaycehn was initially built on unstable ground, and the oldest colonists had no way to know where the stable ground was. They searched until they found an area that could support their city.”

“Sounds plausible, doesn’t it?” Lentz says. “Until you remember that humans aren’t native to this place. The colonists had enough scientific skill to travel through space, then colonize this area and begin to farm it. You’d think they could figure out rudimentary geology.”

“Science doesn’t always follow a linear path,” says Ilona, but she’s frowning. She’s thinking about this.

Both Mikk and Stone are restless. But I’m fascinated. I have to force myself to eat some of the food on my plate. Not even the tastes are familiar, except on a basic level—bitter, sweet, salty, bitingly spicy. I pick at what’s before me, then push the plate away.

“Well,” Lentz says with a small shrug, “whether or not you agree with the premise for his research doesn’t matter. He started the work because he didn’t believe his own country’s history.”

I’m glad Lentz is the one describing this. Gregory doesn’t have the people skills, and Ilona is too invested in Vaycehnese life.

“He dug through old records and found a lot of the basic stuff you’re talking about, Lucretia. He found the measurements, as well as stuff on whether the ground is stable, whether or not there’s bedrock, how deep the solid layer goes before they find ground water, all of that kind of thing.”

”And?” Mikk isn’t even trying to mask his irritation at the way the scientists present things.

“And,” Lentz says, “the old studies confirm what he suspected.”

”Which is?” Mikk asks.

”That these death holes appear in solid ground. The catacomb of caves here were created by the phenomenon that creates the death holes. And it’s ongoing.”

”Like volcanic activity?” Stone asks. Now she’s intrigued.

”Not quite,” Lentz says. “Because there’s always a history of volcanic eruptions in the past.”

”Maybe a groundquake, then,” she says.

“On an unknown fault line, maybe?” Carmak asks.

I shake my head. Even I know this. We have the capability to map tectonic plates from space. There are no unknown fault lines on any settled planet.

I’m about to say that when Lentz shakes his head.

”It’s more like an explosion from underground,” he says. “With a directed charge, made to create a hole in the surface above.”

”Have they gone down to check what causes the explosion?” Bridge asks,

”Initially,” Lentz says. “Which is why they’re called death holes.”

“Because the investigators mummify,” Mikk says,

Lentz shakes his head. “Because the investigators vanish.”

”Vanish?” I frown at him. He’s enjoying dragging this out. “What does that mean?”

“It means that they’re never found,” he says.

”Does anyone search for them?” I remember how reluctant the guide was to let me down the corridor.

”Not after the first one or two don’t make it back,” he says. “Then they use animals to test. Usually after a dozen years or so have passed, something survives, and then it’s deemed safe. But until then, no one goes in the death holes.”

”Sounds like they learned about these places the hard way,” Ilona says.

Everyone turns toward her, as if her statement is obvious.

“I mean,” she says, “they have a protocol and a name for the phenomenon. So that means that these holes repeated, and then after a while, they needed a way to deal with them.”

“Ilona’s right,” Bridge says. “A culture doesn’t name a phenomenon if it’s extremely rare. And it doesn’t create a protocol if the phenomenon happens once every hundred years or so. How many of these have there been?”

Lentz shrugs. “I didn’t talk to him all day.”

“But you found out a lot,” I say, wanting him to continue. “Does he think it’s odd that these places eventually become safe?”

“No,” Lentz says. “He says it validates his theory, that some kind of gas or something builds up and then explodes. It then dissipates over time, and the hole becomes safe.”

“If there was gas, it would be released into the atmosphere, contaminating the area around it,” Gregory says. “Did he find that?”

“He’s only had two death holes to study since this became his expertise. But the records don’t show any areawide deaths.”

“Because,” Ilona says, “they clear the areas when a death hole appears. You told us that.”

“History tells us that,” Carmak says.

“I’d like to know what happened the first time a few death holes appeared,” I say. Because it doesn’t have to be a gas. It could be a field. An expansion of a stealth-tech field—a different kind than we experienced in the Room of Lost Souls, but an expansion nonetheless.

Still, I don’t say that. I’m still not willing to admit this place is tied to ancient stealth. We haven’t seen stealth tech act like that.

Or have we?

I turn to Gregory, whom I hired because he once specialized in stealth tech. He was one of the government scientists who tried to reverse-engineer stealth tech with Squishy.

“When you guys were trying to re-create stealth tech in the lab,” I say to him, “did you get some localized expansion phenomena? Something that would resemble what’s going on here?”

He sighs. He hates talking about that time. What Squishy told me in as little detail as possible was that in the two hundred years the Empire has been trying to re-create stealth tech, the program has lost ships, materiel, and people.

When he remains silent, I add, “Squishy told me that a lot of people died while she worked on the program. I assumed they got trapped in the stealth-tech field. Is that what happened? Or were there ‘explosions’ to use Lentz’s word? Did the field expand unexpectedly?”

“C’mon, Boss,” Roderick says, “we’ve already seen that. In the Room. The way the station just kept getting bigger.”

“But that looked like it was falling out of the field,” Mikk says. Even though he gets impatient with scientific theory, he does remember it. Sometimes I think he’s too smart for the rest of us, which is why his patience with people who establish fundamentals before they get to the point is so short.

“Greg?” I ask. “Did it suddenly explode?”

“‘Explode’ is the wrong word,” he says. “Sometimes it would expand. It would be concentrated in one area, like air going through a tube.”

“Or a narrow field coming up through the earth,” says Stone.

Even though we’re not on the Earth, no one corrects her. We know what she meant.

I sigh. “This isn’t evidence, you know.”

“It’s another piece,” Ilona says.

It is that.

“Can you get more information from your friend?” I ask Lentz.

“I can try,” Lentz says. “I can ask him to lunch or something. But we have to be really informal. He can lose his job.”

“Hell, why don’t you just hire him, Boss?” Mikk says. “That’ll take care of the cloak-and-dagger stuff.”

“I’d like to know if he has something to add before I do,” I say.

“Besides, hiring him might cut off his access to these death holes,” Ilona says. “It’s becoming clearer and clearer that the Vaycehnese are protecting the reputation of their city, and they’re doing it at great cost.”

“Cities do that all the time,” Carmak says. “Governments lie. They don’t want the bad stuff to get out. That’s normal.”

“But sometimes it’s just there.” Cesar Voris, one of the historians, speaks up for the first time. He’s one of my new hires. Carmak recommended him because he’s an expert in this region of space. He specializes in ancient history, but he loves modern as well, and he spends his off time studying. I’ve never had another employee work quite that hard.

“What do you mean, ‘there’?” Carmak asks.

Voris shrugs. He’s a big man with a shock of white hair that makes his brown skin seem even darker than it is. His eyes are very black and very alert.

He looks directly at me. “You said to find out what we can about the death toll in the caves, so I did.”

“We couldn’t find anything,” Gregory says. “No one’ll talk.”

“That’s right,” Voris says. “But we’re interested in information. History, when you come down to it. So I went to the City Museum.”

“The director wouldn’t talk to me,” says Ilona.

Voris folds his hands together and waits until the others stop speaking.

“The City Museum of Vaycehn,” he says like the teacher he used to be, “is an amazing place. It has a great library, and so many fascinating exhibits, I doubt anyone could see them all in the space of a month.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Mikk says. “Don’t tease us with information and then not give it.”

“The thing is,” Voris says as if Mikk hasn’t spoken, “the exhibits cover the history of Vaycehn as accurately as possible. There is a quick viewing area that the tourists usually go to, and indeed are directed to, being told that the rest of the place will take most of their trip to see.”

Mikk sighs impatiently. I grab another spotted apple and turn it over in my hands.

“But if you go in with an agenda, you can see quite a bit. I decided my agenda was the caves. The longer I was there, the more I realized I needed to know about the way the city center changed location all the time.” Voris raises his bushy white eyebrows and looks at all of us, individually, before going on.

Now Stone sighs.

But Voris doesn’t seem to care. “So I wandered, found an old ruin actually brought into the museum intact—that was interesting—and then found that each display has an information button. You push it and a holographic guide tells you everything you want to know and a few things you don’t. If you push it twice, you can get a hard copy of the transcript, and if you push it three times, you can download that transcript to your own personal system, so long as you sign a few waivers promising not to use it for profit in any way.”

“What did you learn?” Mikk asks.

“That the fourteen archeologists were mentioned for precisely the reason that Dr. Stone said. Because they’re famous throughout the sector and it would look bad for them to just disappear here.”

Stone nods. She clearly feels vindicated.

“But,” Voris says, “I also learned that hundreds of Vaycehnese have died over the centuries in those so-called death holes. And for generations, the caves were off-limits to the Vaycehnese because people would die in weird little pocket areas.”

I take a bit of the spotted apple. It’s sweet and sour at the same time. I could easily become addicted to these things.

“There’s even some images of the first mummies—people they found in those pockets and then removed. There’s an entire section of the museum dedicated to the mummies of Wyr.”

Ilona lets out a breath of air.

“My God,” Bridge says.

“You’re kidding,” Lentz says, but it’s not because he believes Voris is lying, but because he’s stunned that Voris has learned this.

“You think your colleague knows?” I ask.

“I have no idea,” Lentz says. “I’ll ask him tomorrow.”

“He probably does, but doesn’t associate it with the death holes,” Voris says. “The reason the City Museum is there is for the schools. Children parade in and out of that place on assignments all the time. The mummies are one assignment, but they’re considered a mystery. Are they the first humans who came to Wyr before the colonists, or are they native? People connect certain areas of the caves with the mummies, but not the death holes themselves.”

“But you just said that the fields in these death holes recede,” Mikk says to Lentz.

Lentz nods. “I think the people who get trapped inside move away from the area where they entered. They lose oxygen or something—I don’t know—and they die. Then when the fields recede, someone goes in and finds a mummy—not where the person originally vanished, but farther inside.”

“That’s a theory,” Stone says.

“But a good one,” Ilona says, mostly because it reinforces her stealth-tech idea.

“Wouldn’t the Vaycehnese figure out that these phenomena are related?” Mikk asked.

“Not necessarily,” Voris said. “We’re looking for something specific. They’re all looking at the various peculiarities of their home.”

“Some of those peculiarities are just accepted,” Ilona says.

“Research blindness,” Bridge says. “That’s why we try not to have preconceptions.”

I sigh. I am starting to hate that word.

“We have preconceptions,” Ivy says. She is still rubbing her fingertips together. “Maybe they’re clouding our vision, too.”

“Maybe,” I say, “but let’s listen to Cesar. I suspect he has more to tell us.”

“Oh, yeah,” Voris says. “Because there’s a modern mystery to this place.”

There are a lot of mysteries on Vaycehn, more than I want to solve, simply because I want to get away from this hot, gravity-filled planet.

“You mean besides the fourteen archeologists?” Stone asks.

“Sixteen,” Voris says. “There were sixteen.”

We’re all staring at him now. He has a slight smile on his face, and his black eyes twinkle. He looks both impish and pleased with himself.

“Sixteen?” Stone says. “We would know if two others were missing. It would be big news.”

“It wasn’t big news because they were postdoctoral students,” Voris says. “They were working on some project of their own, hoping for recognition, when they just disappeared. The guides say they never came out. They hadn’t followed instructions, had gone into an off-limit area, and disappeared.”

“Like the guides were warning us about,” Ivy says nervously.

Bridge glares at her again.

“Yes,” Voris says. “Maybe that’s why. I’m thinking we should talk to the guides, try to find out how many of their noncompliance tourists have died in those caves.”

“Do that,” I say.

“Before we start your dive?” Stone asks, as if I’m the one who has suggested something out of line.

“No,” I say.

“But what if this isn’t stealth tech?” Stone says. “What if you’re right and this is something else?”

I shrug. “Then we might die.”

Five of the Six gasp. But the divers nod. They know the risks. We face them every time we dive.

“You knew that when you signed on with us,” I say to the five. “That’s part of what we do. We take risks in dangerous places. You signed waivers.”

Half the team looks at their empty plates. Gregory takes more food, as if eating it will protect him.

I half expect someone to say that waivers aren’t the same as realizing the risks. I’ve had tourists tell me that when I take them wreck diving. Then I would keep those tourists in the ship, not allowing them to dive.

But to my team’s credit, they don’t complain. They know what they signed up for, and they’re not going to back out just because the risk has become real to them.

“You think it’s stealth tech now, don’t you?” Ilona asks me.

I’m not willing to concede that, at least not yet. But I do give her this: “I think the chances have gone up. But this could be something else. Maybe the Vaycehnese are right. Maybe this is a localized phenomenon.”

“That makes its own lights?” Bridge asks.

“There are stranger things in the universe,” I say. But not many. Things that act man-made generally are.

“Should we track the deaths?” Ivy asks, clearly not wanting to go back into the caves.

I shake my head. “The historians need to find out about Vaycehn’s earliest settlers. Take Cesar’s advice. Go to that museum. See what the prehistory stuff says. See if you can find evidence of what’s been forgotten.”

“If it’s forgotten,” Stone says, “then no one will find it.”

I smile. My business has always been about handling forgotten things.

“Forgotten doesn’t mean invisible, Lucretia,” I say. “Forgotten sometimes means misunderstood.”

“Or ignored,” Ilona says.

“Or buried,” Bridge says.

I nod. For the first time, I’m enjoying this project. I’m even looking forward to the work below ground.

Maybe that’s because diving is my element, whether it’s underground or in space. Or maybe it’s because I finally believe we’ll discover something.

Stealth tech or not, there’s something here. Something old. Something interesting.

Something unexplained.

* * * *