If their calculations were right, they were at least two hundred years in their own future, in an empty sector base, with a damaged ship.
They saw only catastrophe.
Coop didn’t. If he could repair the Ivoire, he could send her through fold-space to the place where the Fleet might be. His calculations (and theirs) could be as much as fifty years off, but that wouldn’t matter. The Fleet followed a set trajectory. Only battles and meetings with other cultures changed the timeline. Coop’s team could guess the farthest that the Fleet would get on that trajectory, and go there. If the Fleet had already arrived, they could continue until they caught it (which wouldn’t take long). If the Fleet hadn’t arrived yet (which was more likely), they could wait for it to catch them.
The older members of the crew might never see the Fleet again, but the younger members would.
“Two hundred years is manageable,” Yash said softly, clearly mistaking his silence for shock.
“I know,” he said, just as softly, silencing her.
He folded his own hands on the tabletop. He was strangely calm. Now that he knew what was happening, he would probably remain calm until they had a firm plan.
“What kind of evidence do you have?” he asked Rossetti.
She turned to one of the engineers, the only one who Coop had ever interacted with, an older man by the name of José Cabral.
“The equipment itself gives us the timeline,” Cabral said. “The sector base closed one hundred years after we left. A rudimentary staff remained, those who didn’t want to travel with the Fleet to Sector Base Y, which was where this group would be posted. This staff continued to live on the surface, charged with maintaining the equipment at low power levels for the next fifty years.”
Coop nodded. This was standard procedure.
Dix shifted in his chair. The news clearly made him nervous.
“After fifty years without human contact,” Cabral said, “the equipment went dormant. Everything shut down except the touch command.”
Touch command. Meaning that the systems would only reactivate if the equipment got touched by human hands. Coop would have to confirm that with Yash, but he didn’t think that some kind of falling debris would activate the system. Just contact from a member of the Fleet. At least, that was what he had been told.
“How long has this base been dormant?” Coop asked.
“Impossible to tell, sir,” Cabral said. “When the system goes dormant, even its internal clock mechanism ceases. Only the anacapa drive continues to reaction, at a very low level, of course, and then only because it is safer to keep the drive running than it is to shut it down.”
Coop nodded. He had been told that as well.
“If I may, sir.” One of the scientists, a middle-aged woman, spoke up. She was thin, with harsh lines around her mouth and eyes. Coop had to struggle to recall her name, which he had only heard in the context of this mission, “The evidence points toward the machinery being off for a very long time.”
One of the other scientists held up his hand, as if to stop her, but she caught his hand in her own and brought it down.
“What evidence?” Coop asked.
“The particles, sir,” she said. “Nanobits are durable. They don’t lose their bonding except in a few instances. Most nanobits lose their bonding through a particular kind of weapon fire, which we see no evidence of here. It could also be caused by a chemical reaction, which we also have no evidence of. In fact, if the chemical reaction had occurred, the room itself would be toxic.”
“And the other instance?” Coop asked.
“Time,” she said. “Specifically, five hundred to a thousand years, sir.”
“We don’t have proof of that,” said the scientist whose hand she still held. “We just have supposition.”
“And past experience,” she said. “We’ve encountered this before, and by we, I mean the Fleet. Never have the nanobits lost their bonding in less than five hundred years.”
Coop’s stomach flipped. He had to work to keep his hands relaxed, so that his knuckles wouldn’t show white.
“We’ll have to test to be certain,” said one of the other scientists. He wasn’t looking at Coop, but at Dix. Dix, who sat rigidly next to Coop. Dix, who, rumor had it, had fallen in love with one of the chefs on the Geneva.
The Geneva, which was traveling with the Fleet.
If the Fleet was five hundred years distant from them, in no way could Coop plot the Fleet’s course. There were too many variables. Two hundred years was at the very edge of possible.
Five hundred years meant that the Ivoire might never rejoin the Fleet.
Coop wouldn’t let himself think of that. He didn’t have proof.
“The equipment itself isn’t damaged,” Rossetti said, trying to take control of the briefing back from her scientist. “It’s just old.”
Coop nodded.
“We should be able to use information in the database to help us fix the
Ivoire,” she said.
He nodded again. He wasn’t thinking about that quite as much. He knew his engineers could fix the Ivoire. She had extensive damage, but none of it was catastrophic.
He was more concerned about their current situation.
“The outsiders,” he said, and paused. Everyone looked at him. They clearly hadn’t expected him to mention the outsiders at this point. “You told me their suits looked underdeveloped.”
He said this last to Yash.
She nodded. “Ours are technically superior, if that glove is any indication.”
“Oxygen cylinders, knives, inferior suits,” he said. “Their society didn’t develop from ours, then.”
“Probably not,” Yash said.
“So the settlement on the surface is gone,” he said.
She shrugged. “We don’t know that.”
He nodded again. Two hundred years was a long time. They were going to need to know about the history of Sector Base V as well as Venice City, what they had missed, and what they faced.
“I assume that the shutdown was a standard shutdown,” he said to Rossetti.
By that, he meant that the sector base was shut down because the Fleet had moved on, not because of some problem on the planet itself.
Rossetti had to look at her team.
José Cabral nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said, answering for the team. “The shutdown was ordered by the Fleet and completed according to procedure. Staff remained behind. At that time, Venice City was a thriving community, and many people did not want to leave.”
“No indications that anything went wrong on the surface?” Coop asked.
“None,” Cabral said.
Coop nodded. “Clearly, we’re going to need more information. We need to know how much time has lapsed. We’re going to have to try to figure that out. I assume there are tests you can use on the equipment which will tell us how long it has been unused?”
He directed this last at the scientists.
“Yes and no, sir,” the woman said. “We will know within a few decades how long the equipment’s been sitting there. But we might not learn exactly. It depends on the conditions underground. Without an accurate history, we won’t be able to be precise.”
“Doesn’t the equipment record conditions in the room around it?” Coop directed this last at Cabral.
Cabral looked at the other engineers. They silently conferred.
“I know for a fact that we’ll have a record of the first one hundred and fifty years, sir,” Cabral said. “After that…”
He let his voice trail off as he looked at the other engineers again. None of them spoke.
They didn’t know for certain.
“We can date the parts, do experiments to track decay,” one of the scientists said, sounding a little more excited than Coop expected.
“But we’ll just be guessing,” another scientist said.
“We’ll be accurate within a fifty- to hundred-year range,” said the woman.
“I
think closer to two hundred years,” said the scientist whose hand she held.
“Clearly, we don’t know, sir,” Rossetti said, more to stop the argument among her people than anything.
“Can we map the corridors from the repair room? Get a sense of the surface?” Coop asked.
“It’ll take time,” one of the engineers said. “The equipment will need a little repair.”
“I think we can map the corridors, sir,” the woman said.
“That’s a start.” Coop stood. He paced for a moment, thinking this through. Then he paused and glanced at Yash.
“Let me see the schematics of the base from our files,” he said.
She pressed a button, and the base’s plans appeared on the screens. A warren of tunnels and corridors and exits onto the surface.
On another screen, she put up a map of Venice City, without him having to request it.
He studied the maps. Cities weren’t like ships. Cities changed over time.
Sometimes cities built over their past. Sometimes they retained their historic buildings.
But every city he had ever visited, whether established by the Fleet or not, had historians and libraries and methods of keeping track of its own past.
“We’re going to need to go up there,” he said, more to himself than to everyone else.
“And how are we going to explain our presence?” Dix asked, his voice wobbling.
Coop turned and looked at him. Dix was gray. He looked ill.
For the first time since Coop met him, Dix actually seemed terrified.
“I mean, if they’re sending outsiders down here, and the outsiders seem surprised at the room itself, and they wear environmental suits that they don’t need—”
“We don’t know if they don’t need them,” Yash said. “They might.”
“You think they have different physiology?” Dix asked.
Yash shrugged. “I don’t know. People get used to different things. Maybe other parts of the sector base are toxic. We don’t know anything.”
Dix’s mouth thinned. He didn’t like what she was saying.
“That’s a side track,” Coop said to Dix. “You were making a point.”
Dix nodded. “Let’s assume that on the surface, they don’t know this base exists. Then we pop out of the ground. How do we explain that?”
“Isn’t that the least of our worries?” Rossetti asked. “After all, we don’t even know if the map is accurate, if the corridors have fallen in, and if the exits still exist.”
“We don’t know if Venice City still exists,” the woman scientist said.
Coop shuddered at that thought. Maybe the old-timers had been right. Maybe they should have been careful about how they named their city. They had named it Venice City because the Earth city had been built on canals. But it had eventually disappeared under the water.
What if this Venice had disappeared as well?
“The history still might be there,” Coop said. “It might help us refine the timeline, if nothing else.”
“We’re going to be here for a long time, aren’t we, sir?” That was Shärf, who hadn’t spoken up at all until now.
Coop looked at him. Unlike Dix, Shärf didn’t seem panicked. In fact, it seemed to Coop like Shärf had asked the question not for himself, but for the other people in the room, as if he was trying to prepare them for the inevitable.
“There’s that possibility,” Coop said. “But we knew that before we landed. Even if the sector base were here and running the way it had been a month ago, we still would have been here a long time. We sustained a lot of damage. We need to do the repairs. We have the time to figure this out.”
As he said the sentence, he felt the irony of the word “time.” They had a long adventure ahead of them, whether they were two hundred years behind the Fleet or five hundred years.
The emergency that he’d been feeling since the attack of the Quurzod more than two weeks ago had coalesced into something else. A situation, a crisis. But a slow-moving one.
One that would take patience and effort and a lot of hard work to resolve.
He would have preferred a fight to the death.
But he didn’t have that. Instead, he had to rely on his specialists.
He stood behind his chair and gripped its back. Then he looked at everyone, taking the time to meet everyone’s eyes before he spoke.
He wasn’t quite sure what he would say. He knew he had to reassure them. He also knew that he needed to set up a plan so that they could all move forward.
He couldn’t make that plan with a committee. He had to figure it out on his own.
He nodded at them, silently acknowledging what they all knew. Things had changed, and it would take a little while to get used to that change.
“Thank you all for the work,” he said. “You’ll have new orders tomorrow. We’re going to figure out exactly when we are. But know this: we’ll be all right.”
He sounded confident even though he didn’t feel confident. He felt as if someone had shut off the ship’s gravity and he was floating, unfettered, in a world he thought he knew.
The others, though, seemed calmer. Maybe it was the shared knowledge. Maybe it was the fact that they were not in charge of it; he was, and as their commander, he was the one who needed to solve the problem.
But he knew, as a commander—as a human being—that some problems had no easy solution.
And this problem was one of those.
~ * ~
THIRTY-NINE
The rock pile grows smaller, and as it does, I realize something.
The dust pile is growing smaller as well.
The floor has absorbed the dust.
Now my questions become urgent. I want to ask Paplas how this functions. I want to know the answer immediately. It’s one of the stranger things I’ve seen—and I’ve seen a lot of strange things.
But I cannot ask, and Bridge looks too frightened and too confused to know that these questions might be important. I can’t even tap Bridge, like I had planned, and whisper a question to him. With his left hand, he clutches his ear protector as if he wants to pull it off. His other hand squeezes his knee.
Paplas grins as he moves forward. He loves this job, working alone, underground, using his gigantic machine to crush rock.
I can empathize. I love working alone as well, and I’d probably be just as annoying with strangers in my ship as he has been with us.
It’s a way of maintaining distance.
I grip the seat in front of me with one hand, wishing I could move up front. I want to watch the procedure. I want to see what the equipment’s control panel says, even though I really don’t understand Vaycehnese.
I’m fascinated and a bit worried about the vibration and the rock walls, although it seems to make no difference to Paplas at all.
It takes less than an hour to work our way to the crushed hovercart. All that rock, gone. The Bug slows as it reaches the back end of the hovercart, and those big legs move almost daintily across its back.
They take rocks and move them a few meters away, then pulverize them, takes me a moment to realize that Paplas is trying to protect the hovercart.
Does he think there are bodies inside?
I want to tell him that there aren’t, but I don’t. His admonition against me was strong enough that I don’t want to put my presence here in jeopardy.
Instead, I watch the deliberate movements he uses to get each rock out of the cart itself. Within fifteen minutes, the back end is clear. Then the front, with the controls.
Oddly, the seats are relatively undamaged. The benefit of a cart, I guess. It just filled with rock. I can’t see well enough to know if the floor of the cart is all right, but it just might be.
The Bug carefully lifts the rocks off the front end. Each rock seems larger than the last.
I finally understand why the cart is bent at an upward angle. The rocks almost flattened the very front part of the hovercart. Had anyone been stand
ing there, they would have been crushed.
I shudder. My people faced this, without me. We were somehow protected in that room.
I would rather die in the vastness of space, slowly freezing to death, unable to breathe as my environmental suit shuts down (or gets breached) than I would being crushed by a load of rocks in an underground cave.
No wonder some of my people looked at me with great hesitation when I said we needed to get back down here quickly. They have vivid imaginations. They know that they could die like this, that the ground around us is horribly unstable, and that it’s worse inside these caves.
They know it and they don’t want to come back down.
Is it fair to ask my team to come with me?
I’m not sure on that.
Fortunately I have some time to think about it. Although I have less time than I originally thought.
Paplas finishes digging out the corridors with surprising speed. When he’s done, he says nothing to us. He does pull off his ear protectors. Then he rapidly rotates the pod 120 degrees, so that we’re now facing the way that we came into the corridor.
Then he marches the Bug forward, as if we’re late to an appointment.
Bridge clutches his ear protectors, uncertain whether or not to remove them. I pull mine off.
Suddenly, noise fills the little pod. The grinding gears, the thudding from the massive feet, a humming sound, probably caused by our proximity to the stealth tech—something I had forgotten to warn Paplas about.
My heart rate surges, and for a moment, I feel guilty. I have been so absorbed in the process that I have forgotten the real danger.
But Paplas has that map, and the area just beyond that last rock fall is marked in black. I finally realize what the map is. It is a map of the areas inside the caves where people have died mysteriously.
Bridge leans forward. “Can we take off our ear protectors?” he says, just a little too loudly.
“Why not?” Paplas says, as if the very question is ridiculous.
Bridge whips his off and juts them forward, as if he expects Paplas to take them from him.
“Hang onto them,” Paplas says, his hands busy with the controls. The Bug hasn’t moved this fast since we got below ground. In fact, I didn’t know it could move this fast.
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