These suits didn’t even have separate helmets. Instead, they had full-face hoods with clear material that ran from the ears to the eyes, wide enough not to impede the wearer’s vision, but much more protective than a glass or plastic plate over the face.
The only problem with that part of the suit design was that Coop had to intuit mood. He couldn’t see expression, except through the eyes themselves.
Not that it mattered in this instance. In this instance, he had told the team to communicate everything, so that he, Yash, and Dix could track what they were doing.
Through a special earpiece, Dix monitored the scientists on one channel. Yash monitored the engineers on another. Coop monitored the leaders on a third. The team spoke among themselves on a fourth channel, using it only when necessary, so that they didn’t clutter up each other’s hearing with needless chatter.
There wasn’t much chatter on Coop’s channel while the team waited on the floor for everyone to emerge from the airlock. He watched them in relative silence. Rossetti updated him with names as each person joined the group.
Once the team was assembled, she gave them instructions. They divided into three groups, each composed of an engineer, a scientist, and an officer. The engineer and the scientist had been assigned to a section of equipment. The officer guarded them and provided advice.
Because this was a first-contact team, it also had two guards, whom Rossetti sent to the outside door. They stood just behind it, using sensors to monitor the exterior as best they could. Coop hoped that they’d know well in advance if the outsiders were returning.
Rossetti’s team stayed closest to the ship. Coop had determined that. He wanted her near that door in case the outsiders returned. He also figured the active equipment up front would have the most information, so he made certain that his best team was on that section, instead of the farthest back.
Ahidjo’s team took the middle section. Shärf’s team took a far section. They only covered about an eighth of the repair room. More equipment faded into the dark. Coop would save that for later missions, if he needed them.
Of course, Rossetti’s team reached their equipment first. They split, the engineer looking at the actual workings, the scientist taking the readings. Rossetti hung back, looking around as if she expected something bad to happen.
“Sir?”
Coop started. Rossetti’s voice had come along a fifth channel, one that went directly into his earpiece. It sounded like she was standing beside him.
He had to change frequencies on the small mike he had placed in his front teeth. “What?” he subvocalized, so that he didn’t disturb Dix or Yash.
“Something’s odd here,” Rossetti said.
He wanted to say, No kidding, but he knew better than to waste precious time talking. He simply waited for her to continue.
She did. “You’ve known me for some time. I’m not superstitious, but something feels wrong here. I can’t quite figure out how to describe it.”
“Try,” he said.
She nodded once. Her head bob made more particles swirl around her. It looked like his team was in a particle storm.
Ahidjo’s team had just reached the second section of equipment. The engineer touched the edge of the console, and lights flickered on.
Coop smiled. He had expected that. It confirmed what he had thought earlier; the outsiders had turned the equipment on when they started exploring the room.
On the third channel, he said, “Ahidjo, Shärf. Make sure your teams shut down that equipment before you leave today.”
“Yes, sir,” they said in unison.
Rossetti turned her head toward them, observing their progress for a moment. Then she continued on the fifth channel.
“If I had entered this place without knowing what it was,” she said, her tone measured as if she was choosing each word carefully, “I would think that it had been abandoned long ago.”
“Why?” he asked.
She shook her head, but he didn’t think that was her entire response. It looked more like an involuntary movement, an I-don’t-know kind of reaction.
After that, she paused for a very long time.
“I can’t give you a definitive answer to that, sir,” she said. “It’s just an impression.”
Then she fell silent. Coop didn’t expect her to say more. His people were used to quantifying things. The fact that she couldn’t figure out a reason for her feeling probably bothered her more than it bothered him.
It had taken a bit of courage for Rossetti to tell him about that sense of abandonment. Yet she felt it important.
She wasn’t sensing lingering violence, the way he had upon entering an area after a battle; she was sensing emptiness.
Coop didn’t like emptiness. He would have preferred the lingering violence. It suited his training so much better.
The third team reached their piece of equipment. The lights came on, but they looked very far away and faded. The particle storm made them hard to see.
Maybe the particle storm gave Rossetti that feeling; maybe it was something else. When the others returned, he would ask them if they had felt something similar.
At the moment, however, they worked, updating him periodically, not saying exactly what they found—that was for the return briefing—but letting him know that the work was proceeding, that no one had entered the room (even though he could see that), that the equipment seemed to be working fine.
So far, no one had found any communications problems in the sector base’s equipment, which meant that the Ivoire’s communications array had been damaged, just like Yash suspected. The engineers on his ship had even more work to do than they all initially suspected.
The time passed quickly. Yash and Dix monitored their frequencies as well as did some work on their own consoles. But Coop just studied the repair room, unable to shake what Rossetti had said.
He had experienced that feeling of long-abandonment in a place recently vacated just once in his career. He’d been twenty-five. He was at Sector Base T, and he accompanied a senior officer as they did a final inspection of a decommissioned ship.
The ship, the Défi, had been badly damaged in an attack. Rather than repair it, the staff at Sector Base T would use it and another badly damaged ship to build an entirely new ship.
The Défi had been Coop’s home during the last of his education. A lot of cadets went there for officer training. The ship had had a lively, active student community, as well as the usual crew complement and domestic side. He had loved that place.
But it had seemed entirely different on that final walk-through, as if someone had taken the heart out of the ship. Which, apparently, they had. Without the human population, the Défi had become just another junked ship, ready to be torn down into its various parts.
That ship still haunted his dreams. Sometimes, old friends long gone would run down its corridors, laughing as they coaxed him into the Grog, the cadet bar. He didn’t drink much—never had, really—so his presence in the Grog was always an event.
He would wake up feeling sad for something he had lost.
Maybe that was what Rossetti was feeling. She had been here just a month ago as well. He had no idea what kind of experiences she had had curing their layover. Maybe those were coloring her reaction now.
But that wasn’t something he could discuss with her on Channel Five or on Channel Three. He would wait until she returned.
At four hours and thirty minutes, he reminded his team that they had to shut down before they returned. He also wanted additional cameras (if there were any) disabled. He wanted the interior to look as much like it had when the others left as his team could make it.
They began their shutdown procedures. In the distance, he saw the lights of the far sector shut off. At least that was working. Then middle section went off. If the team returned quickly enough, maybe the particles would have stopped swirling.
He stood near the wall again, hands clasped behind him. His heartbeat had ri
sen just slightly. He wanted the team to move quicker, although he didn’t say anything.
He wanted them out before the outsiders returned.
At the end of their fifth hour, the exploratory team was all inside the airlock. The lights on the far panels had gone out, and the teams had reported that they had altered the feeds on all the cameras they could find.
The particle storm settled.
Just like Coop, the base seemed to be waiting for the outsiders to return.
~ * ~
THIRTY-SEVEN
Once the Bug stops walking, its movements become smooth. Paplas positions it over the cave opening. For one heady moment, I can see down the hillside into Vaycehn itself.
Dust still rises from the new death hole, but the dust is now just a blight on the landscape, not the overwhelming part of it. A fire burns a few kilometers from the death hole, the result—one of the hotel staff told me that morning—of damage from the groundquake.
Apparently groundquakes don’t just cause things to collapse, they cause systems to fail. The collapse might ignite a fire or start a flood of water in addition to the damage from the collapse itself.
As Bridge and I look at the city, Paplas adjusts the controls. His hands fly across his control panel, stopping occasionally to grab a lever and pull it. It’s almost as if Paplas himself has dozens of arms just like the Bug does.
Finally he stops moving for a brief moment. He turns his head slightly, looks at Bridge, and says, “Now we descend.”
The Bug’s pod floats downward, almost like a ship. In fact, I would think of it as a ship except that it is not moving on its own propulsion, but being levered down by the legs. Some remain on the surface as the pod eases into the darkness. Others float past us as they make their way down, anchoring those bendable feet on the side of the cave itself.
It’s not quite right to say that the walls have closed in. We just feel closed in because the big black legs take up so much space inside the hole.
I’m also not in control—of the mission, of the Bug itself, of Paplas. So I sit, with my hands clasped, letting someone else do work I would rather do.
I glance at Bridge. His expression is hard, as if he’s willing himself to remain calm.
Paplas is grinning, his hands moving delicately over the controls.
It takes less than three minutes to descend to the cave floor, the same distance it took me half my life to climb up. No wonder I had no sense of how deep we were before. The equipment the Vaycehnese use is so quick and sophisticated that it makes long distances seem short.
The legs work their way down and settle around us. Paplas turns to Bridge.
“Now for the fun,” Paplas says.
Bridge frowns at him, not understanding. I do. Working equipment in a particular setting, even if the setting is ruined and dangerous, can be a great deal of fun.
With a jerk of the pod, Paplas moves the Bug forward. I can’t tell if that jerk comes from a part that needs repair or a flaw in the design. As the Bug flattens itself out to move into the corridor, Bridge says to Paplas, sounding a bit nervous, “I guess you assessed the damage yesterday, huh?”
“Assessed?” Paplas says, not looking back.
“You know,” Bridge says, and he does sound nervous. “Figured out how bad the damage is, how much work you’ll have, how long it will take?”
I suppress a smile. Bridge has worked with me long enough to learn my work habits. He’s come to expect them from everyone who does work in places that Bridge sees as alien.
“Why would I do that?” Paplas asks.
Bridge looks at me, panic clear on his face. I smile and shrug, expecting this. Paplas has a system. He’s clearly done this before. To him, this is a cleanup task, not an exotic adventure.
I glance at the control panel. On it, Paplas has a map of the corridors, some areas shaded dark. A small red beacon shows where we are.
It takes just a moment to get to the first rock fall. The Bug stops. Paplas grabs something from under his seat, then turns to us.
He’s holding ear protectors.
“I almost forgot,” he says. “Put these on.”
I take mine. They’re a bit greasy, either from being under the seat so long or from the previous user. I wipe the part that will go against my ears, then put on the ear protectors. Instantly, all ambient noise vanishes.
Bridge deliberately widens his eyes as he looks at me, an expression that means You’ve got to be kidding. Fortunately, he doesn’t say that to Paplas.
Instead he wipes off the ear parts and stick them on, then glances at me.
Paplas has put on his own ear protectors. He doesn’t look at us as he moves one of the legs forward.
It feels odd to see the leg move and not hear the attendant sound, almost like we are in space. I’m suddenly more comfortable.
Bridge is not. He squirms in his seat.
I smile reassuringly at him.
The leg jams against a head-sized rock. Instead of picking it up, as I expect, the leg starts vibrating.
It takes a moment, without the sound, to realize what the leg is doing.
It’s pulverizing the rock.
I frown. I thought we were going to lift the rock out of the cave, carrying it in those legs just like Mikk and Roderick had done as they worked to get us out ot one of the corridors.
Instead, Paplas is destroying the rock.
I want to ask what’s going to happen to the dust, but I can’t. Even if he let me talk, he wouldn’t be able to hear my question.
Instead, I sit forward on my seat so that I can see better. Half the legs have moved to the front of the pod and started pulverizing.
I know now why we needed the ear protectors.
The Bug vibrates a little. I want to know why the sound won’t cause the rock walls around us to vibrate and collapse. I want to know if Paplas has done this before (although it seems pretty clear that he has).
Bridge clutches the edge of his seat. I lean as far forward as I possibly can without attracting Paplas’s attention.
The rocks gripped in the legs grow smaller. Dust forms, and so far, none of my questions have been answered.
~ * ~
THIRTY-EIGHT
Coop paced as he waited for the team to arrive in the briefing room. He, Yash, and Dix had places at the head of the table. Lynda’s crew now had control of the bridge, and the rest of Coop’s team had gone to dinner or to their evening recreation.
Anita and Perkins had both protested; they wanted to be part of the meeting. But Coop wanted the briefing to remain as private as possible. After his conversation with Rossetti while she was in the base, he was worried about the information the exploratory team would bring back.
The exploratory team arrived in the briefing room with their handhelds. They all had wet hair and loose-fitting clothes, having cleaned up after their mission. The white environmental suits looked gray upon their return, and they’d peeled them off in the airlock, but some of the particles still stuck to their clothing, which was why Coop had approved real-water showers as well as the standard sonic shower. He also made them change in the decontamination area just in case.
The scientists and engineers moved toward the back of the room. The commanders clustered near Coop, Yash, and Dix. Rossetti had turned on the wall screens when she came in. She had plans for this briefing, then, which was one of the things Coop liked about her.
She thought ahead.
Currently, the screens had no images, just an occasional multicolored line through the center to show that the screens were drawing power.
Coop closed the briefing room door, then took his seat at the head of the table. “What’ve you got?” he asked Rossetti.
She was the only one of the group who didn’t look tired. She sat, spine straight, her small hands flat on the tabletop.
“First,” she said, “we don’t need the suits. Every test we did says the atmosphere inside that room is fine.”
“And the parti
cles?” Dix asked.
“Harmless,” she said. “They’ve been through more testing than we usually do on anything. They seem to be unbonded nanobits, and we’ve all worked around unbonded nanobits before.”
They had. The bits occasionally got into the lungs, but could be removed with little effort. Many of the Fleet’s crew members had no reaction to nanobits at all, and could, in fact, absorb them. It was, one of the medics once told Coop, a genetically desired trait that seemed to have developed in the Fleet’s population over time.
Rossetti glanced at the others from her team, then said, “It would be easier to work in the repair room without the environmental suits.”
Her team had clearly asked her to say that. She hadn’t done any hands-on work, so this wasn’t coming from her experience.
“So noted,” Coop said. He would make no promises without consulting with his best people. “What else do you have for me?”
Rossetti took a deep breath, then pressed her hands against the tabletop. He finally understood why she sat that way; it was a calming gesture, one she clearly needed.
“Do you recall what I told you, sir, when I was on the repair room floor?”
“Yes,” he said, and didn’t elaborate. He hadn’t mentioned it to his team, but he would tell them if they needed to know.
“Apparently, I was right. The sector base had been long abandoned, sir. The mandatory shutdown sequence began one hundred years after we left.” She spoke flatly, as if the news hadn’t bothered her at all. But her splayed hands belied that.
“One hundred years?” Dix’s voice rose slightly. He looked surprised.
But Yash didn’t. Her features remained impassive.
Coop’s heart was pounding. “We left a month ago.”
“Yes, sir,” Rossetti said. “But the elapsed time in the station is at least two hundred years, maybe longer.”
She hadn’t insulted his intelligence by explaining how such a thing could happen. They all knew. It was one of the risks of the anacapa drive.
“You’re certain of this?” Coop looked at the scientists and engineers. What he had initially taken for exhaustion was defeat. And fear.
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