I can’t get careless now, so close to the top.
“Are you up there by yourself?” I ask as I get closer.
“God, no,” she says.
“Are there guides?”
“Yes,” she says. “No medical personnel, though. They had to leave.”
I don’t want to know why.
“Get someone who can help me over the edge,” I say. “I’ll need water and food. In fact, we’re going to need to send water and food down. Can you do that?”
“Easily,” she says, and disappears again.
The medical personnel have left, even though we might need medical attention. Something has gone wrong elsewhere, or maybe even nearby.
As I reach the top, two of the guides lean over the edge.
I stifle a gasp. I’m afraid they’ll knock me loose.
“Don’t touch me,” I say. “Help when I tell you.”
Still they put their hands near me, so they can grab me if they need to. I’m alarmed at their closeness, but I’m comforted by it, too. I’m not alone here.
I was afraid I’d have to get over that edge on my own.
My head pops over the top.
Rubble everywhere, and another hovercart on its side. I see dust, rising in the distance, and hear faint voices from far away. The skyline looks different, but I’m not sure how.
I don’t care how, not at the moment.
“Okay,” I say. “Help me up.”
They grab my armpits and pull me over that edge. I scramble several meters away before stopping. I don’t want to fall back into that damn hole.
Ilona gives me a bottle of water. McAllister Bridge hands me some of that amazing applelike fruit that I enjoy. I’m surprised he’s there. I look around, realize that everyone is here—everyone I brought with me, my entire team.
It’s unbelievably hot, and I’m incredibly tired. But we’re nowhere near done.
“Get food down to the others,” I say to Ilona.
“Already doing that, Boss,” she says.
I nod. I’m a bit dizzy, and there are black spots in front of my eyes. I will myself not to faint. I grab that water and pour it over my head, cooling myself down. Bridge hands me another bottle of water without saying a word.
I wipe the water off my face. My hand comes away black. I must be filthy.
“All right,” I say. “Now how the hell are we getting the rest of the team up here?”
~ * ~
TWENTY-NINE
Coop managed four hours of sleep before his active brain woke him up. He went to the captain’s mess, had a huge breakfast, and then headed to the communications array.
Shipboard communications ran through the bridge, but the bulk of the equipment was in the engineering area. Engineering covered the largest part of the ship. Located in the very center of the ship as a precaution, engineering was usually one of the most stable parts of the Ivoire.
Although the engineering section hadn’t been stable since the Quurzod attack. Their quick, sharp one-man ships had gotten too close to the Ivoire, and their weaponry, while lacking power, had a directional focus that went into one part of a key system and moved through that system, effectively destroying it.
The engineers were rebuilding certain parts of the ship from scratch, including much of the Ivoire’s weaponry. The anacapa, the most protected part of the ship, had been damaged, but not destroyed.
The communications array, however, suffered the most damage. Coop needed his best engineers on the weaponry and damage to the anacapa, so he pulled some of the linguists to work on the communications array.
Linguists got engineering training on the communications array so that they could tweak it to meet the needs of some unknown language. Most of the linguists had no knack for engineering or repair, but one of them had an intuitive understanding of the array that bordered on genius.
Mae, his chief linguist. Also his ex-wife.
She stood near the door, a repair pad in hand, studying the schematics before her. The communications array filled the entire room and looked like many of the ship’s important systems—tiny panels with flips and lights that provided a redundant entry to the touch screens on each panel’s front.
An efficient communications array would be small enough to fit on the bridge. But the Fleet had more redundant systems than any other group of ships Coop had encountered. Because the ships of the Fleet were designed to operate on their own for years without going to a sector base, having redundant systems made sense. One part of the system might go down, but other parts would still function.
Every system on the ship had that kind of backup except, of course, the anacapa.
He stood in the doorway and watched the team of five work on the array. Mae didn’t realize he was there. She seemed focused on the flat screen in her hand.
She was a beautiful woman, even with her red hair pulled severely back away from her face, a face that actually had some frown lines now. The lines gave her character, although he would never tell her that.
“Mae?” he said softly.
She jumped. She had been on Ukhanda for several months before the disaster. Her team had died at the hands of the Quurzod, and she had barely survived. It had taken her some time to heal once she returned to the Ivoire. Coop had pushed her into the repair work quicker than her doctors wanted, but he knew she had to keep busy.
And she couldn’t be busy with language. She felt that she had screwed up linguistically with the Quurzod, and she had lost her confidence. He wanted to ease her back to work. He figured fixing the array would do it.
“Hey, Captain,” she said with a bit of a smile, the smile she always used when she called him by his title and not his name. “I thought you’d be on the bridge, worrying about this strange place we find ourselves in.”
Two of her team members peeked out from behind the array. She waved them back to work. The other two didn’t even look up at Coop. They knew their priority was getting the array in top condition.
“So you’ve looked outside,” he said to Mae.
“I think everyone on the ship has,” she said. “We’re relieved to be out of foldspace. Some people don’t care that things are strange here. They’re just happy to be somewhere.”
He didn’t correct her. They had been somewhere when they were in foldspace. He just didn’t know exactly where.
“Repairs are slow, but happening,” she said, anticipating his question.
But of course, you know that from the daily reports.”
He nodded. She knew that he wasn’t here for the update.
“When we came here,” he said, “we came because they received our distress signal, right?”
She looked at him sideways. One of the benefits of closeness was that he understood the look without words. She wasn’t going to talk in front of her team.
He pivoted and went into the corridor. She followed. They moved away from the door.
“We sent distress signals on all channels the entire time we were in fold-space,” she said. “The base did receive our signal, but that’s where the information gets fuzzy.”
“Fuzzy?” he asked. She chose that word deliberately. Mae spoke twenty-five languages fluently, but her best language was Standard. She believed in precision on all things. So when she said “fuzzy,” she meant “fuzzy.”
“It blurs together,” she said, “and the condition of our array does not allow me to figure out exactly what happened.”
“What’s your best guess?” he asked.
Her lips thinned. Mae did not like guessing.
“I need a theory,” he said.
“From what I can tell, this sector base was offline for a long time.” She held up her hand. “And before you quiz me, I can’t tell how long.”
He nodded. He didn’t expect her to know when his bridge team hadn’t been able to figure it out, either.
“The strangers in the base probably touched the consoles, activating them.”
He nodded. His t
eam had already figured that out.
“The activation,” she said, “includes a scan of outlying systems, looking for missed communications.”
“That’s when the base heard our distress signal?”
“Probably,” she said. “Then the automatic retrieval system activated, using their anacapa to power ours. At least, that’s what engineering tells me.”
“That’s the theory at the moment,” he said. “What’s the problem?”
She took a deep breath, as if she were uncertain. He was still not used to an uncertain Mae. He kept forgetting how fragile she was.
“I’m not sure they received our distress signal at all,” she said. “I can’t find notice of an acknowledgment, a receipt, or even that mingling within our systems.”
“Then how did they find us?” he asked.
She bit her lower lip. “I think this place sent out a signal when it activated, but it wasn’t a communications signal. It was their activation beam, the anacapa, pulling in anything within range.”
He frowned. “The system’s not built for that, Mae.”
“I know,” she said. “But the first communication—if you want to call it that—that registered on our system was their anacapa.”
He thought for a moment. Mae was thorough. He knew what procedures she would have run, but it was his duty to ask about them anyway.
“You don’t think the damage to our systems prevented us from storing the communication?” he asked.
“I’m hoping that’s the case,” she said in a voice that told him she didn’t believe it. She thought that the communication hadn’t happened.
“But?” he asked.
She took a deep breath. “Ever since we arrived, we’ve been trying to communicate with the sector base. I’ve redoubled the efforts since it became clear that we wouldn’t go out into the base for a while.”
“And?” he asked.
“And we can’t do it. We can’t reach those consoles out there, even though we’re only a few yards away. Either whatever’s broken on our side interferes with communicating with them, or something’s wrong on their side.”
“Or both,” he said.
“Or both,” she agreed.
“You’ve looked at the scans of the consoles,” he said.
She nodded. “They’re in rough shape, Coop. I’ve seen it before.”
“You have?” he asked.
“In our training. We had to take some ancient equipment and cobble it into an existing system. The ancient stuff had been in good repair. It was just old. The readings you got off the systems out there, they look a lot like the readings we got from the ancient equipment.”
“I assume you double-checked those readings,” he said.
“No,” she said. “I don’t have raw data. It was a school project.”
Meaning it was more than a decade ago, and she’d jettisoned the information, if she ever had it.
“Ancient,” he said, thinking of her precision with words. “Not old?”
“Not old,” she said softly. “Time ravaged.”
“Could other things cause that?” he asked.
She shrugged. “You need to ask a real scientist or a very experienced engineer. My specialties are communications systems of all types, and I remember that one. I could be wrong. I probably am—at least about this.”
“I trust you, Mae,” he said.
She looked down. “Maybe you shouldn’t.”
He wanted to put an arm around her, pull her close. But he didn’t. She was going to have to recover her confidence on her own.
“I’d like you to take some of the team off the general repairs. I want them to focus on communicating with the section base. If you have to cobble something together, then do so.”
She raised her head slowly. The frown still marred her forehead. “Do you think we won’t be able to go out there and do some work in the base?”
“I don’t know when the first team will leave the ship,” he said. “I want to be prepared for everything. The more work we can do from in here, the happier I am.”
She took a deep breath. “All right,” she said. “I’ll make sure we figure out how to talk to the sector base.”
“And it can talk back,” he said.
“Oh, it’ll talk back,” she said. “I’m just not sure we’re going to like what it has to say.”
~ * ~
THIRTY
They bring in a vehicle like I’ve never seen before. The Vaycehnese have special equipment for dealing with tunnel collapses and cave-ins and people trapped below ground.
The guides couldn’t request it until they knew we were alive—a stupid rule, I think. But Bridge explains it to me.
The entire city’s in chaos at the moment. A death hole has opened in a far section of Vaycehn, a section that has never seen death holes before. This death hole is huge, and it has swallowed an entire block. The rescue efforts are concentrated there; the bulk of the equipment is there.
The rest of the equipment is reserved for just this kind of emergency, but it gets prioritized. The equipment goes where human life is threatened first—where the Vaycehnese know that human life is threatened—and then it goes to the other areas.
We weren’t a priority because they hadn’t heard from us.
No one had until I started climbing out of that damn hole. The angle of that opening made voices from below impossible to hear. And there were no guides with us. Apparently, they had been waiting on the surface until an hour or so before we were scheduled to leave. Then they returned below.
So when the groundquake hit, our guides were above ground and nowhere near the opening. Ilona has no idea if they even tried to find us. She doubts it, but she’s checking into it.
Of course, they admit nothing.
They did send a message for assistance, but got none because they had no idea if we survived. Then they contacted Ilona and asked her if she wanted them to wait. They were itching to help with the rescue efforts elsewhere.
She gave them what for. But before they even contacted her, the guides with medical training left so that they could help at the death hole.
Apparently, that’s procedure in Vaycehn. Whenever a death hole opens, the most experienced emergency personnel and people with medical training flock to that site and help as quickly as they can.
It’s a coordinated effort—”a beauty to behold,” Bridge said to me with more admiration than I wanted to hear. Tourists and outsiders were left to their own devices, while the locals helped each other.
I was trembling with fury by the time I figured that out.
Or maybe just exhaustion.
The minute Ilona heard my voice, she ordered the guards to get the rescue equipment. They were already on it. Once they knew the outsiders were in trouble, they didn’t want to seem callous. But it still took some time for the Bug, as they call the rescue vehicle, to get to our location.
The Bug is amazing. It is tall—three times the height of an average human—but relatively thin. Its center is a pod with clear openings all around. The operator is completely visible.
Its sleekness reminds me of a single ship—at least in the pod part. But the sleekness ends with the pod. The rest of the Bug is all mechanical legs, with many joints, “like spider legs,” Bridge says, marveling again.
I take his word for it. I’ve never seen a spider.
The pod has legs on all sides. I count twenty, but I’m not certain because of the way they bend and hang and change. The Bug smells hot, and it groans as it moves, as if each bend in the legs needs lubrication.
One of the operators—a man whose name I didn’t catch—tells me that sound is normal. It enables people inside caves and near the Bug to know when the Bug is coming. The sound also informs people to stay out of the way.
It walks across the surface to get here, picking its way over the rubble with a delicacy that belies its size. As it comes, I talk to the guides. Or rather, Bridge does and I listen. The guides still have
trouble seeing a woman as the leader of our small group—although they seem to be afraid of Ilona now.
I wonder what she has threatened them with.
The guides say that the Bug fits only four people, including the operator. I have left eight below.
“All right,” I say after it becomes clear that the Bug will have to make three trips below just to get my people out. “Kersting, Quinte, and Seager come out first. Roderick and Mikk come up last. You got that?”
I say this last to the operator. He shakes his head—our names are difficult for him.
Ilona sighs with exasperation and writes everything down on one of the passes we were given long ago. “You give that to them,” she says to the operator.
He looks at Bridge, as if Bridge would contradict her.
Bridge takes the paper and hands it to the operator. “You must give that to them,” he says, as if Ilona hasn’t spoken.
She makes a sputtering noise. I put my hand on her arm. She glances at me, then rolls her eyes.
I hope no one else saw that. Right now, we need the Vaycehnese and their expertise.
The operator nods and gets into the Bug. He looks like an organic part of the machine, sitting in the very center, his hands on controls that look like miniature versions of the legs.
It’s rare that I see a vehicle I cannot drive, but the Bug is one. I have no idea how he controls the legs, given that they each have such individual movement. He walks it over to the opening that I scrambled out of not long ago.
Then the Bug spreads its legs over the opening, using ten of them to surround the oval. The pod centers, then sinks inside. Other legs move inside with the pod, gripping the walls—or so one of the guides tells Bridge— while the ten legs remain on top for what seems like a very long time.
One by one, the legs disappear. I hurry toward the edge, but someone grabs my arm.
It’s one of the guides. He frowns at me. “You cannot go there.”
“I want to watch,” I say.
“It will take no time. You could get hurt.”
I shake him off and hurry to the edge. I can see the ends of three legs, disappearing along the slope.
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