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 come 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 Section 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 Section 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 compliment 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 during 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 risen just slightly. He wanted the team to move quicker, although he didn’t say anything.
He wanted them out before the outsiders returned.
Ultimately, he needn’t have worried. At the end of their fifth hour, they were 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 wanted it to. If the others worked on six-hour rotations, like he thought, he had built in an hour to spare. They would return soon.
He would let Rooney monitor them.
He would be in the briefing room with the teams, learning what they had found.
***
What they had found was troubling indeed.
The teams had arrived in the briefing room for the meeting with their handhelds. They all had wet hair and loose fitting clothes, having cleaned up after going into the repair room. 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 sat toward the back of the room. The commanders clustered around one end of the table. Coop, Yash, and Dix sat at the other end.
The briefing room, like the bridge, had no portals. In here, the wall screens were usually off, but someone—probably Rossetti—had turned them on. There were no images, just an occasional multi-colored line through the center to show that the screens were drawing power.
“What’ve you got?” Coop asked Rossetti.
She was the only one of the group that didn’t look tired. She sat, spine straight, directly across from him, 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 particles?” 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 the teams, 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 said.
Coop’s heart was pounding. “We left a month ago,” he said.
“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. The drive folded space, which meant that it could (and often did) cause a ship to go out of time.
During those fifteen days stranded in that unidentified part of space, Coop had worried about this aspect of the anacapa drive. He had known that foldspace occasionally caused time alterations. His training taught him not to worry about them until he was confronted with them.
Which he was now.
“You’re certain of this?” he asked.
He looked at the scientists and engineers. What he had initially taken for exhaustion was defeat.
And fear.
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 knew that in this instance, time was on his side. If he could repair the Ivoire, he could send her through foldspace 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.
If the scientists were right.
If the Ivoire truly was two hundred years in its own future.
“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 that 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 function, 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 it 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 chemical reaction that we haven’t seen here, or 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 would 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. I’m also going to want to talk with the outsiders.”
“You sir?” Rossetti said, before biting her lower lip. She clearly hadn’t meant to speak out of turn. The statement had been involuntary.
“Yes,” he said.
“I don’t think we should surprise them,” Yash said.
“We won’t,” he said. “We’ll let them know we’re here.”
Maybe the outsiders had answers. If nothing else, he could get past them and travel up to the surface. Someone in Venice City had to know something.
If Venice City remained.
He 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?
He placed his hands flat on the table and used them to push himself to his feet.
“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 so
meone 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.
***
Coop had to work on three things at once: He had to repair the Ivoire; he had to download information from the sector base; and he had to approach the outsiders.
He ordered his engineering staff to concentrate on the Ivoire’s repairs. He needed the ship in full working order so that they could leave Sector Base V at a moment’s notice.
He assigned the scientists and some junior engineers to the sector base team. If repairs were needed on the sector base equipment, his senior engineering staff could handle those after they finished with the Ivoire.
He alone was going to worry about the outsiders.
His first step: he had to let them know he was here.
So, after the outsiders left from their latest foray into the repair room, he sent Rossetti’s team back into the room, with orders to download information and to leave the equipment running when they completed their five-hour mission.
Rossetti’s team didn’t wear environmental suits. The team had no trouble working, and didn’t seem to have any ill effects from the particles. The studies were correct; the room itself was as harmless as it had been two hundred plus years before.
Rossetti’s team worked hard. They left the equipment running when they returned to the ship. They went through decontamination and testing to make certain they remained healthy, and they continued their work inside the Ivoire. They weren’t to contact him unless or until they had processed new information from their downloads.
He was less concerned with that information than he was the outsiders.
He made sure he had control of the bridge when the outsiders returned.
They opened the door at the exact moment he expected them. The woman came in first. She stopped and held out a hand, as if to prevent the others from entering.
The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas Page 27