Fifteen days of drift—full engine failure, at least on the standard engines. The anacapa had worked—it had gotten them there, after all, wherever there was, which none of them could exactly figure out. It seemed like they’d moved dimensions just like they were supposed to, but something had gone wrong with the navigation equipment, confirmed by scans.
An asteroid field where there shouldn’t be one. A star in the proper position, but not at the proper intensity. A planet with two moons instead of the expected three.
Nothing was quite right, and yet a lot was. Coop hadn’t even wanted to think about the possibilities.
He hadn’t dared.
He’d set up the distress beacon, the one tied to the anacapa, so that it could reach any nearby bases, and prayed for an answer.
Which hadn’t come.
So he’d increased the scans. The Ivoire hadn’t been able to move yet—not with a regular drive, anyway, although repairs were coming along, as the engineers said—but everything else seemed to be working.
They should have gotten a response from two different bases: Sector Base V and Sector Base U, which was at the very edge of their range. Not to mention Starbase Kappa, which—according to the records—wasn’t that far from here.
Nothing. He’d left the signal on, but had checked it and had asked the science whiz kids in the school wing to work the design for a new signal, something a little less formal, he said, and he’d told their teacher what he really wanted was for them to build a new signal from scratch.
Just in case the old one had been damaged in the fight with the Quurzod, and somehow that damage hadn’t registered. He couldn’t spare the engineers to do the work. He needed the students more than he ever had before.
He hadn’t told the teacher that, but she clearly figured it out. She looked grimly determined and told him the kids would get on the project right away.
They were only half done when Dix caught the edge of a reply.
Automated from Sector Base V: We have heard your distress signal. We are prepared to use our own drive to bring you to us. If that is what you need, turn on your anacapa drive now.
Without a second thought, Coop turned on the drive, and the Ivoire whisked out of the drift, their drive piggybacking on Sector Base V’s.
The Ivoire’s journey took half a minute, maybe less. They were drifting in an unknown part of space, and then they weren’t.
Then they were here, in Sector Base V, beneath the mountains that towered over Venice City.
They were here and they should have been safe.
But they weren’t.
Coop had a sense they were in more trouble than they’d ever been in before.
~ * ~
FOURTEEN
A Dignity Vessel.
An intact, functioning Dignity Vessel. My heart rate has increased and my breathing is shallow. My environmental suit issues warnings, thinking I’m in space, thinking I could die at any moment.
If I were wreck diving, my team on the skip would be talking to me via the comm. They’d tell me to leave the dive, return to the skip.
They’d accuse me of having the gids.
But the four in this room aren’t experienced divers. I haven’t even told them to turn on their monitors to monitor each other’s suits. They should have thought of it themselves; after all, they’ve gone on practice dives.
Not that it matters.
We’re not in space.
I make myself take a deep breath, will my heart rate to slow, will the gids to go away. Even though they’re not the gids.
What I’m feeling is excitement.
I’ve seen a few intact Dignity Vessels, and they are pitted and scarred and ruined and empty.
This one—this one glimmers with newness.
Finally, my brain kicks in. “Check the environment,” I tell the team. “Make sure nothing has changed.”
Our readings so far have shown that we’re in an oxygenated environment. We could survive without the suits, but we don’t. I’m glad for that since flakes swirl around us.
The Dignity Vessel has disturbed the entire area. The ripples caused some kind of disturbance, which makes sense. One moment the area in front of me was empty; the next it was filled with a gigantic ship.
I feel tiny beside it.
Here, in this cavernous room, I get a true sense of how big a Dignity Vessel is. They look tiny in space because space is so vast.
Here, though, here the vessel is bigger than any building we’ve seen on Vaycehn, bigger than some active spaceports.
I have to force myself to take another breath. In fact, I have to use a trick Squishy taught me back when we dived together. I count my breaths— inhaling for five seconds, exhaling for five seconds—until my breathing evens.
I’m having trouble concentrating on the breathing. I’m having trouble concentrating at all.
I’ve never dreamed I’d be in this position.
All of my life, I’ve chased history. I’ve dived the oldest, most decayed wrecks I could find, not to loot them, but to study them, to learn about them.
The history of the sector is rich and vast, and we’ve forgotten ever so much more than we learned. I’m firmly convinced that no one person can know everything that has happened in this sector since humans started colonizing it. Every historian I know specializes, in a culture, in a war, in a planet or a technology.
None of them are generalists about the sector, although we all learn sector history—its broad sweep from early colonization to the beginnings of the Empire to the Colonnade Wars.
We study it. We imagine it.
We don’t see it.
Not as it was.
And yet, here before me is a piece of history. Not decayed or damaged by time. Not ruined by some long-ago battle. Not abandoned centuries before I was born.
Glistening, shimmering ever so slightly. Making slight noises as its hull adjusts to the temperature inside the cavern—a temperature that has dropped precipitously because this vast ship in front of me has brought the coldness of space with it.
I swallow hard. My breathing is finally regular. I take another step toward the ship.
“It’s colder in here than it was,” Kersting says. “But otherwise, I get the same readings.”
“Yeah,” Rea says. “You’d think that there’d be something different in the air. Maybe less oxygen or some hint of a fuel or something. But I’m not getting anything either.
“Me, either,” DeVries says.
“Is it really there?” Seager asks.
Good question. I suspect the ship is in front of me because of the temperature differential, but none of us has touched the ship. We haven’t even gone near it.
For all we know, this is some kind of elaborate illusion, something designed to keep us away from the platform.
My stomach twists at the thought. I want the thing before me to be a Dignity Vessel—a real, functioning Dignity Vessel, not an illusion designed to chase people from the cavern.
“Let me find out,” I say.
“Boss, one of us should deal with it.” Rea takes a step toward me.
I turn slightly and shake my head. “I know what I’m doing.” With wrecks, anyway, which this decidedly is not. “You stay there.”
I walk to the ship’s side. The external temperature recorded by my suit has lowered even more. Something is in front of me, or else the illusion is so grand that it includes temperature.
I wonder if it includes smell as well. I’m not willing to take off my helmet to find out.
I stop only centimeters from the ship. The side is smooth, black, and shiny, like the new walls at the exterior of the caves. I expected something more metallic. The Dignity Vessel we found all those years ago—the first Dignity Vessel, the one that started me on this path that led me to Vaycehn—had a metal hull and rivets holding plates together.
This has no rivets, no bolts, no old-fashioned parts. The side is so smooth that I can see my reflection in it.
<
br /> Through the particles, that is. The particles are flaking off the walls, not the ship. The ship’s side is as smooth as glass.
My suit pings me. I’m holding my breath again. I make myself breathe; then I extend a hand before I can talk myself out of it. I press my palm against the ship’s side.
It’s solid beneath my glove. The suit protests—the ship is so cold the glove adheres to it for just a moment, and then releases. I have the suit take readings from the surface.
“It’s real,” I say with more relief than I intended. “It’s real.”
~ * ~
FIFTEEN
Perkins returned quicker than Coop expected. She had to have scurried down those corridors.
“It’s the same,” she said, somewhat breathlessly. “The view’s the same.”
He had expected that, and yet had hoped for a different outcome. Dix bent over his console. So did Anita. They checked their readings again, probably for the fifteenth or sixteenth time.
Coop took a deep breath. He didn’t need the repeated readings. The equipment said they were in Sector Base V, so they had to be in Sector Base V.
A different Sector Base V than the one he had left a month ago.
He ran a hand over his face. The anacapa created a fold in space. That was how the ships continued to travel through hundreds of years. They rarely got damaged in battle, and when they did, they could go elsewhere to repair. The Fleet had learned long ago how to do extensive repair in space, but they had also learned that sometimes parts simply wore out. Repair could only do so much, particularly when spread over hundreds of years, thousands of battles, and countless trips via the anacapa drive.
That was why the Fleet built settlements on hospitable planets, usually choosing a mountainous region, always picking a hard-to-reach (by ground) location far from the main civilizations (if there were any). The settlements were mostly underground and were never considered permanent.
Sector Base N, for example, had been abandoned for nearly four hundred years. No one from the Fleet went back to that sector, so they didn’t need the base.
Although on every settlement, a handful of people chose to stay. Some married into the indigenous population. Some simply liked life planetside better than life in space, although Coop never understood why.
As a kid, he’d thought about all those lost bases like he thought about the nearly mythical Earth, and wondered what it would be like to return to them.
His father kidded him, saying Coop was the only child whose adventurous spirit turned backward instead of forward.
Coop let his hand drop away from his face. Then he looked at the wall screens again.
“It doesn’t make sense,” he muttered.
The others were watching him. He wasn’t sure how many of them knew what he was thinking.
And he wasn’t exactly sure what he was thinking. Had someone left the base’s anacapa drive active, even though the base had been under attack? That didn’t make sense, because every commander—on base and on ship—was instructed to shut off an anacapa drive before enemy capture.
Shut off, or destroy.
Even though the Fleet had traveled all over the known universe, it had never encountered another civilization with an anacapa drive. They had encountered other marvelous technology, but never anything as sophisticated and freeing as the anacapa.
Without the anacapa, the Fleet could never have continued on its extensive mission. Without the anacapa, the Fleet would never have left its own small sector of space around Earth.
The anacapa had enabled the Fleet to travel great distances, carrying its own brand of justice and its own kind of integrity to worlds far and wide.
Had the anacapa drive here in Sector Base V malfunctioned, forcing everyone to leave? He’d heard of malfunctioning anacapa drives before. They were one of the most dangerous parts of the Fleet. A ship with a malfunctioning drive sometimes had to be destroyed to protect the Fleet and anything around it.
But that made no sense either. Because the anacapa drive inside all the sector bases was tied to working equipment. Not just working equipment, but equipment that had been turned on and used manually by a human being within the past twenty-four hours.
It was a failsafe, designed by some far-seeing engineer—or, as Coop’s father would have said, designed by a professional worrier, someone who tried to see all the problems and plan for them.
The failsafe had been designed to prevent exactly this kind of problem: a ship, arriving in an empty base, could get trapped. If the anacapa didn’t work, and the corridors leading to the surface had collapsed, then the ship— and more important, its crew—wouldn’t be able to escape above ground.
The human failsafe was necessary because no one knew—even now, after generations of using the drives—how long an anacapa could survive without maintenance. There were some in the Fleet who believed that an anacapa drive would remain functional long after the human race had disappeared from the universe.
The human race hadn’t disappeared. The anacapa drive still worked. But something had happened in the repair area. Something bad.
“Should we go out there, see what went wrong?” Perkins asked.
No one answered her. She specialized in communication. She spoke fifteen languages fluently, another forty haphazardly, and had a gift for picking up new languages all the time. She wasn’t as good as Coop’s former wife, Mae, the Ivoire’s senor linguist. But Mae had come back from her experience with the Quurzod damaged. As she healed, she worked on the communications systems, not on the bridge.
“We can’t go out there yet,” Coop said. “We need to know what we’re facing.”
“You think the base was attacked?” Dix asked.
“Possible,” Coop said. He didn’t want to reveal his suspicions any more than that. He wanted the bridge crew to explore all options. “Let’s figure out what’s going on here before we make any moves.”
“Sir?” Yash sounded strange.
He glanced at her.
She was pointing at an area on the wall screen. A woman walked toward the ship’s exterior. The woman was thin. She wore a form-fitting environmental suit of a type Coop had never seen before. She had cylinders attached to the belt on her hip and what looked like a knife hilt.
He could only get a glimpse of her angular face through her helmet.
As he watched, she reached out and put her gloved hand on the Ivoire’s side.
“Is she the one who attacked us?” Perkins asked.
“We don’t know if the base was attacked,” Coop said.
“But it’s been abandoned,” Perkins said.
“There could be a variety of reasons for that.” This time, Dix answered her. But he didn’t elaborate and neither did Coop.
But Perkins wasn’t dumb. Just inexperienced. “So is that woman part of a repair crew?”
“I don’t think so,” Yash said. “I don’t recognize her suit.”
“It could be special hazmat suits from Venice City itself,” Anita said.
Perkins’s eyes opened wider. “Hazmat? So it’s toxic out there?”
Coop shrugged. “We don’t know anything yet. All we know is that we’re here, nothing is as it was when we left, and a woman is in the repair room. We don’t even know if it’s a woman we’ve met before. I can’t see her face clearly, can you?”
“No,” Dix said.
“But she’s human, right?” Perkins asked.
“What else would she be?” Yash asked with a touch of impatience. The Fleet, in all its travels, had never discovered an alien race, not as the Fleet defined it, anyway, which was a nonstandard, unexpected life-form of equal intelligence to humans.
“I don’t know,” Perkins said. “That woman looks weird.”
Perkins’s voice held an edge of panic. She’d felt responsible for the Quurzod disaster, even though the fault didn’t lie with the linguists. She had held up well during the fifteen days in that unrecognizable area of space, but she must have
been clinging to the thought that everything would be fine when they reached Sector Base V.
And now everything wasn’t fine. It was enough to break a more experienced officer.
“When was the last time you slept, Kjersti?” Coop asked.
She looked at him sideways, understanding in her eyes. She knew that he had caught the beginnings of panic in her voice, knew that he was about to send her to her quarters.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“Go rest,” he said.
“Sir—’”
“Kjersti,” he said. “Go rest.”
She straightened, recognizing the order. “Whom should I send to replace me?”
“No one,” he said. “Not just yet. I’ll send for you if we need anything.”
She nodded, thanked him, and left the bridge.
The others watched, knowing they were as tired, as worried, and maybe even as panicked. They just had more experience and knew how to push the emotions away.
“Are we getting any readings on the environment out there?” Coop asked. “Any idea at all why that woman is in an environmental suit?”
“Everything reads normal,” Yash said.
“But that stuff floating around her,” Anita said. “What’s that?”
Coop didn’t see floating material. The entire repair room looked dim to him. Clearly Anita saw something. But she was closer to the wall screen.
“Maybe that’s the hazardous material,” Dix said.
“We don’t know if it’s hazardous out there,” Coop said. “Perhaps the suit is just an excess of caution.”
“Why would she be cautious about a base underneath a mountain?” Dix asked.
“Tunnel collapse?” Anita said.
“Sometimes planets themselves create a hazardous environment. When they built Sector Base S, they encountered a series of methane pockets,” Yash said.
Everyone looked at her.
She shrugged.
“We had to study base building in training,” she said. “Sector Base S is a cautionary tale. We actually learned how to build without exposing anyone to underground surprises.”
“They weren’t building anything here,” Coop said.
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