We go up two levels. I make a map in my head, compare it to what I know. We’re heading toward the cockpit, but I have a hunch we’re not going there. We’re going to one of two large rooms that I believe to be conference rooms. One is just off the cockpit, and I can’t imagine a captain bringing strangers there.
The other is one level down, and several meters away. That’s the one I would use, and as we turn right, that’s the one we’re headed to.
I don’t say anything. I’m too busy looking at things—the black walls, just like the walls in the caves; the writing that is missing in my Dignity Vessels; and the cleanliness that comes from constant maintenance.
None of the ships we’ve found have these smooth black walls. I suspect that beneath them is the gray metal we’re used to, with the rivets and the welded parts. This blackness is something new, or it’s something that doesn’t last when a ship loses power for centuries.
We reach the door to the conference room. The door is closed. There are no guards outside it.
The lieutenant stops and looks at me.
“The captain wants to have only four of us inside,” she says slowly.
“All right,” I say.
Then she swings the door open and waits until we go in.
I step in first.
The room is nothing like I imagined it to be. Only the dimensions remain the same as the rooms I’ve seen in the other two Dignity Vessels.
This room has a table down the center, so well polished that I can see my own reflection. A dozen chairs are bolted to the floor, and there are actual sideboards. The walls show an unfamiliar skyscape, but that’s no painting. It’s a recorded image being shown on the screens that encase us.
A man stands at the head of the table. He’s surprisingly tall and broad shouldered, with dark hair that touches his collar. His eyes are blue, his features sharp.
He doesn’t have the thinness of someone raised in space. He’s muscular with strong bones, certainly not something I would have expected, even though the lieutenant doesn’t look space-raised either.
He bows slightly to me. “Welcome,” he says in Standard, mangling the word so badly that I almost don’t recognize it.
“Thank you,” I say in his language. I’m probably mangling that phrase as badly as he mangled “Welcome,” but I don’t mind. The phrase brings a smile to his face, one that softens his features.
He greets Al-Nasir personally, and Al-Nasir answers. Then the captain offers us refreshments from the sideboard. There are baked goods I do not recognize, carafes of something that looks like wine, and a variety of fruits and cold vegetables.
He lets one of his hands linger near a carafe. I nod. He picks up a glass, pours an amber liquid for me, another for Al-Nasir, and hands them to us. Then he pours two more, one for himself and one for the lieutenant.
Apparently the polite customs are the same in both of our cultures.
He indicates the chairs near the table. The lieutenant sits, then looks pointedly at Al-Nasir. He sits near her.
The captain stands near the head of the table. He says very slowly, “My name is Jonathon Cooper. I am captain of this ship. People call me Coop.”
His nickname. “Coop,” I say, careful to pronounce it the same way. “People call me Boss.”
He pulls out his chair and sits. I sit at the same time, taking the chair to his right.
“Boss,” he says as he sits. “Lieutenant—” And then he says that word I can’t quite understand, clearly her name. “—is not sure Boss is your name or your title.”
“Both,” I say.
He doesn’t understand that, but she does. She repeats it to him.
He replies in his own language and looks at me. I don’t understand a word, but she is able to translate.
“They call you by your title?”
“I prefer it,” I say.
The conversation is slow as the translations go back and forth, but it feels right, as if he and I are actually talking. I glance at Al-Nasir. He nods. He’s understanding us both so far.
The captain says through the lieutenant’s translation, “Surely you understand my position. As commander of this ship, I cannot call someone else Boss.”
I shrug. I expected this. “Then call me what you will.”
His lips twist into a slight smile, and the game is on. He now knows I’m only going to tell him what I want to tell him and nothing more.
“Fahd Al-Nasir will do his best to translate for me,” I say.
No one has said anything about my knife, which surprises me.
“I have a team of linguists monitoring the conversation,” the captain says. “They might be able to assist if we need it.”
“A team of linguists,” I say. “I am impressed. How large is your crew?”
“Five hundred strong,” he says.
Five hundred. The number staggers me.
“We guessed perhaps a hundred,” I say.
“You’ve never encountered one of our ships before?” he asks.
I’m going to be as honest as I can with him, unless I believe some of the information is not to our advantage. “Not a working vessel,” I say.
He frowns. That answer clearly disturbs him. “How many of our ships have you encountered that don’t work?”
“Five,” I say.
“Five,” he repeats, then holds out his open hand. “Five?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Do they have any crew?” he asks.
I study him for a moment. He expects Dignity Vessels to have a crew. I expect them to be abandoned and ruined. Something is quite off here.
“No,” I say. “They have all been abandoned.”
The lieutenant touches her ear. She repeats my word again. Clearly the linguists are working on it.
“They’re empty,” I say to him. “The ones I find are derelicts.”
The lieutenant looks at me, her face a little slack, not from the linguists nattering in her ear, but from my words.
“Empty,” she repeats. “Destroyed?”
“A couple of them,” I say. “I don’t know if they were ruined by time or by some kind of battle.”
“You found them all in the same area of space?” she asks, her Standard fluid.
“No,” I say.
She looks away from me, blinks hard, and frowns. The captain says her name sharply. She nods but doesn’t look at him. Then she swallows visibly.
My words have disturbed her.
The captain asks her something in their language. Al-Nasir answers, slowly, trying to translate my words.
The lieutenant raises her hand, as if asking for a moment. Her palm is shaking.
She then turns to the captain and speaks rapidly. Al-Nasir leans forward as if he’s trying to understand.
The captain’s frown deepens, and he looks at me. He says something to the lieutenant, clearly meaning for her to translate.
“How long abandoned?” she asks.
“We don’t know exactly,” I say.
She repeats this. The captain speaks. She translates: “You have a guess.”
I shrug a shoulder. This seems momentous to them.
“Please,” he says to me in Standard. “Please.”
That moves me more than I expect. Beneath this show of diplomatic courtesy, beneath the rigid military behavior, beneath the patience of the past two weeks lives panic.
I have just tapped into it.
And I think I’m about to make it worse.
“My guess is based on what little we know about Dignity Vessels,” I say. “We believe they’re legend. Myth.”
The lieutenant translates. The captain looks surprised. He narrows his eyes and looks at me. Then he nods, asking me to continue.
Maybe the mood in the room is catching, because I’m suddenly nervous. “The ships we’ve found are at least five thousand years old.”
The lieutenant doesn’t translate. She tilts her head and looks at me as if I’m crazy. I feel crazy.
She still doesn’t translate. Her mouth is open slightly.
The captain says her name. She doesn’t respond. He says her name again, then touches her shoulder. He says something else.
Al-Nasir leans into me. “He’s asking her if she needs to leave, if they need to bring in someone else.”
She’s shaking her head. She rubs a hand over her mouth, squares her shoulders just like Al-Nasir did before we got on the ship, and then she speaks for several minutes to the captain.
He repeats a phrase a couple times. I don’t need Al-Nasir to tell me that the captain is asking about my numbers, about that five thousand years.
He turns to me, his lips thin, his eyes steely. He’s not angry. He’s not upset like the lieutenant is. But he’s disturbed and trying to hide it.
He asks something with a great deal of intensity, the words sharp and hard.
“How long has this base been empty?” the lieutenant asks slowly, as if she’s afraid of my answer.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“What do they say in—?” and then she uses a phrase I’ve never heard. Before I can ask her to clarify, Al-Nasir says, “Vaycehn. She’s asking about Vaycehn.”
“What do they say about the base in Vaycehn?” I ask. “They have no idea it’s here.”
The captain speaks without her. “You know.”
I understand him. He’s not commenting. He’s asking. How did I know the base was here?
I try to think of a way to answer him, one that will be understandable without a lot of explaining in languages neither of us completely understand.
“We didn’t know,” I say. “This place surprised us.”
That much is true. I brace myself for the next question, trying to figure out how to explain energy signatures and death holes and all of those problems in a way that the lieutenant and those unseen linguists could understand.
The captain asks his question, and the lieutenant translates.
“How long has—Vaa-zen—been here?” she asks, mispronouncing Vaycehn.
“Here?” I ask. “On Wyr? This planet?”
She nods.
“It’s the oldest city in the sector,” I say, stalling because I know instinctively that he’s not going to like the answer. “Vaycehn has been here more than five thousand years.”
~ * ~
FIFTY-EIGHT
Five thousand years. The woman who wouldn’t tell him her real name kept saying five thousand years.
The woman watched him, concern on her face. Coop had a hunch she understood more than she was saying. Al-Nasir had his hands clasped, his forehead creased with worry.
And Perkins fidgeted beneath the table, having as much difficulty as Coop, but in a different area. She believed the number.
He did not.
Five thousand years just wasn’t possible. At least that was what his logical brain told him.
But his subconscious kept whispering that five thousand years was possible. The anacapa could have malfunctioned badly. No one knew exactly where it would take people when it did malfunction. That was the danger of the Fleet vessels.
Coop shook his head slightly, banishing that thought which snuck into his mind. He wasn’t going to deal with that, not now.
He had another problem to deal with first.
“She keeps saying the same phrase over and over,” he said to Perkins. “You’re translating that as five thousand years. Are you sure you’re right?”
She looked at him. The terror in her eyes was answer enough. But she said through her comm link, “Please check that phrase through the system again.”
Coop had already told the linguists this conversation would have to remain secret. But he wasn’t sure about something this big. It would be hard for anyone to keep it secret.
If the translation was right.
“It’s a fairly simple phrase,” the lieutenant said. “And their word for ‘thousand’ is remarkably similar to our word.”
“You told me that similar words could make people misunderstand languages. It’s a common mistake, you said.”
She nodded. “I’m not sure how to check this.”
He knew how to check it. The woman and Al-Nasir were watching closely. Coop picked up a pad from the sideboard and typed in the number: 5,000.
Then he slid the pad to the woman. “Is this the number?”
She bit her lower lip, then looked up at him. He knew the answer before she spoke.
“Yes.”
He ran a hand over his face. Five thousand years was impossible. Five thousand years forward. The Fleet might not exist anymore. She said it was a legend, that they had only found ships without their crew, long empty.
Not abandoned. Maybe no longer useful.
Maybe no longer in use at all.
He stood up, clasped his hands behind his back, not so much to prevent them from shaking—although he needed to do that as well—but to make sure he stayed calm.
Five thousand years.
He took a deep breath. He couldn’t settle the conundrum of five thousand years right now. But he still had a few questions for the woman.
He turned. She was watching him, her body tense. She clearly wasn’t afraid of him, but it was also clear that she wanted to be prepared for anything.
“Why were you here?” he asked. “What made you come to the sector base?”
Perkins had to translate. She seemed relieved to be talking again.
The woman said, “It’s complicated. The short version is that we came because of the stealth technology.”
“Are you sure you got that right?” he asked Perkins. “Did she say stealth technology?”
“Yes,” Perkins said.
“Ask her to explain,” he said.
The woman talked for a moment, waving her hands, indicating the ship itself. Coop silently cursed his lack of understanding. The language barrier was worse than he expected, but why wouldn’t it be, with five thousand years between him and this woman? It was amazing they could talk at all.
“I think I have this right,” Perkins said to him when the woman was finished. “The old Fleet ships that she has found give off an energy signature that they call stealth technology. They call it that because they believe it’s a cloaking device that the Dignity Vessels have.”
“The anacapa,” he said softly.
Perkins nodded. “I think so. She says that it was unusual to find the signature underground, but they came down to investigate, and found the room.”
“Does she live in Venice City?”
“No,” Perkins said.
“So what brought her here?” Coop asked. “How did she even know the signature existed? And why now? If it’s the anacapa, the signature has been here for five thousand years.”
Perkins repeated the question. The woman looked nervous for a moment. She glanced at Al-Nasir as if silently asking him a question. He shrugged.
The woman was clearly deciding what to tell Coop, and she was making that decision on her own.
“What remains of the stealth technology is malfunctioning,” she said so slowly that Perkins was able to simultaneously translate. “The malfunctions are not as big a problem in space because a person actually has to go into an empty Dignity Vessel to encounter it. But here, in Vaycehn, the stealth technology is causing something the locals call ‘death holes.’”
“Death holes,” Coop said to Perkins. “That’s the phrase? You’re certain?”
Perkins nodded, then asked the woman to clarify. This time, the woman spoke for a moment before Perkins translated.
“As best I can understand it,” Perk
ins said, “something goes wrong, and a wave of energy explodes out of the base, blowing a hole in the surface. Then the nanobits coat that hole, and a new part of what she calls the caves are formed. The problem is that no one on the surface knows when or where a death hole will happen. Holes just open up and suck people and buildings into them.”
“My God.” Coop understood the phenomenon the woman described. It was the way the base got built. The base engineers would pick a spot, then start the nanoprocess on the surface, guiding it with their equipment and burrowing into the ground or a mountainside or wherever the base was supposed to go. Then the nanobits would coat the surface, so that nothing could leak or fall or create problems.
The system was supposed to remain self-repairing, even after the shutdown, so no one could get trapped in the base. But it wasn’t supposed to malfunction. It wasn’t supposed to do this.
“How long has this been going on?” he asked.
The woman shrugged. “Throughout Vaycehn’s known history.”
Someone shut down the base wrong, or something went awry and never got fixed. He should have been horrified—maybe he was, beneath it all, beneath the shock of five thousand years—but he was actually a bit relieved.
“We can fix this,” he said to the woman.
“Good,” she said, and he actually understood that word. Then she spoke a bit longer, and Perkins had to translate. “Do you mean you can stop the problems here on Vaycehn or can you help us with the malfunctioning Dignity Vessels as well?”
Dignity Vessel. That term still startled him. “One problem at a time. We can stop the death holes.”
“Then you need to know something else,” the woman said through Perkins. “The worst death hole in centuries happened when your ship appeared.”
He frowned. That made things more complicated. The problem was tied to the anacapa, as he had thought initially.
“My engineers will need to see this, and all the records,” he said. That would also get his people on the surface, gathering history so that they could figure out what exactly happened to Venice City.
“There’s one more problem,” she said. “The people of Vaycehn don’t know that you’re here.”
Something in her voice made him stop. He looked at her, really looked at her. She was worried now, maybe even frightened.
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