He was oddly nervous. He checked in with himself. He wasn’t nervous because he thought he might get some answers. He had already figured out that he wasn’t going to like the timeline the woman would give him—if, indeed, she had one. He suspected the Ivoire was much farther than two hundred years away from the Fleet.
The evidence kept coming in that the Ivoire was at least five hundred years away.
Coop had been thinking of how to break that news to his crew for more than a week now, the news that they were on their own, stranded in the future, with no purpose, no mission, and no chance of ever seeing the Fleet again.
He hadn’t quite come to terms with that, but he was braced for it.
So he wasn’t nervous that the outsiders would tell him a timeline he didn’t want to hear.
He was nervous about meeting them.
And really, if he was honest with himself, he wasn’t nervous about them. He was nervous about her.
The woman had intrigued him from the start, even before he could see her face clearly. She explored an area that had clearly been abandoned, but she hadn’t looted it. She had treated it with respect.
She seemed to be gathering information. When she saw the ship, she didn’t flee, nor did she use weapons to try to break in. She continued her own explorations, and she also tried to figure out the ship.
Then, when she realized the ship was occupied, she didn’t attack. She regrouped, came back, and did her best to communicate with Perkins.
She had shown intelligence, curiosity, and courage, all traits that Coop admired.
He felt as if he was going to meet a colleague, not someone who could do him any harm.
He straightened his shoulders as the door slid open.
The woman came in first, her movements slow, but not tentative. She was slighter than Coop expected. Her image on the wall screen had distorted her height, made her seem taller than she actually was. But she had presence. He could feel it as she moved toward him, hand outstretched.
“Boss,” she said.
At least, that was what it sounded like. Coop glanced at Perkins.
“That’s what they call her,” Perkins said. “I don’t know if it’s a name or her title.”
“Or both,” Coop said.
The man, Bridge, was watching the conversation. His eyes did glitter more than any eyes Coop had ever seen. They must have been artificial. Bridge seemed to be taking in the entire conversation.
Coop decided to ignore him for a moment, and kept his attention on the woman.
He took her hand. It was dry and small, warmer than he expected, certainly warmer than his own hand.
“I’m Jonathon Cooper, the commander of this ship,” he said. “People call me Coop.”
Perkins translated.
The woman nodded. She repeated, “Coop.”
He smiled. “Yes.”
He hadn’t let go of her hand. She hadn’t let go of his. She didn’t smile in return, but the skin around her eyes crinkled as if she was pleased.
“Special Officer Perkins here,” Coop said, “isn’t certain if your name is Boss or if that’s your title.”
The man stepped forward. He seemed alarmed that Coop hadn’t let go of the woman’s hand.
“I’m Bridge,” he said, his words barely understandable. “Boss is her name and her title.”
The woman said something to Bridge, and he responded.
“They call you by your title?” Coop asked her, without looking at Bridge or Perkins.
“I prefer it,” the woman said. Or rather, Perkins said. Her translations were a bit slow, but they made Coop feel like he was having a conversation—albeit an awkward one—with the woman.
“Surely you can understand my position,” Coop said. “As commander of this ship, I can’t call someone else Boss.”
The woman shrugged, her hand still locked in his. “Then call me what you will.”
She wasn’t going to tell him anything else, not yet, and he wasn’t going to call her Boss.
Bridge came up beside her. “I’m McAllister Bridge,” he said in very bad Standard. “I’ll do my best to assist your translator.”
Coop reluctantly let go of the woman’s hand, but he didn’t extend his hand to Bridge, nor did Bridge extend his to Coop.
“Thank you,” Coop said. “I think we need all the help we can get trying to communicate with each other.”
He pulled back a chair at the side of the table for the woman. Then he indicated that they both should sit.
He went to the sideboard, held up the carafe of wine, and raised his eyebrows, silently asking the outsiders if they wanted some.
Bridge looked at the woman. So she was in charge, even if this Bridge was a bit pushy.
“Yes,” the woman said, and that word was clear. So she knew some Standard as well.
Coop looked at Bridge. He nodded.
Coop poured four glasses of wine. He set Perkins’ glass across the table from the woman’s.
Then he sat down at the head of the table. “We have a lot of questions,” Coop said. “We would have talked before, but we wanted to make sure we could understand each other.”
The woman finally smiled. The expression pulled her face together, making her seem both younger and prettier.
“That makes sense,” she said.
Coop folded his hands together. “It seems to me,” he said as clearly and slowly as he could, “that you seemed surprised when our ship arrived. Why is that? Didn’t you know that ships could land here?”
Bridge looked at the woman as Perkins translated. Bridge started to answer, but the woman held up her hand. She leaned forward just a little so that she blocked Bridge’s line of sight.
So, they had a few issues about who was in charge. Bridge verbally acknowledged the woman’s authority, by calling her Boss and telling Coop that was her position, but he didn’t seem to like her control.
The way that the woman tolerated Bridge without disciplining him in any way reinforced Coop’s sense that theirs was not a military operation. It was something else.
“This area has been abandoned for a very long time,” the woman said. “No one even knew the equipment was down here. It surprised us. We were just starting to explore this giant compound when your ship arrived.”
Coop hadn’t expected that answer. He expected something more concrete, something like, The base has been abandoned for two hundred years, so we didn’t think anyone was using it…
“If you didn’t know the base was here,” he said, “why were you exploring underground?”
Bridge’s hand lightly brushed the woman’s arm, but she ignored him. Clearly he didn’t want her to say something. And just as clearly, she wasn’t going to listen to him.
“We were tracking the power source,” she said. “We’re familiar with it. We’ve found it throughout this sector. It’s dangerous and it’s causing problems on the surface.”
“The power source?” Coop looked at Perkins who shrugged.
“I’m not sure of the translation,” she said to him. “That’s what I understand and that’s what the computer gives us.”
“Your stealth drive,” Bridge said. He had to speak the words three times before Coop understood him. Perkins still looked a bit confused.
“Stealth drive?” Coop said.
“The energy signature,” Bridge said. “The thing that allows Dignity Vessels to cloak. It’s still active in this underground area.”
Dignity Vessels. Coop peered at Bridge and then asked him to repeat his words. Bridge did. Coop glanced at Perkins who nodded just once.
She had caught the same thing Coop had. The words “Dignity Vessels” had surprised them both.
Dignity Vessel was the original name of the ships in the Fleet. The name came from the Fleet’s original mission, to bring peace and dignity throughout the known universe.
The Fleet never did bring peace. They focused more on justice. And they did try to restore dignity where there was none.
But they didn’t call themselves Dignity Vessels, although the words were still part of the ship’s identification numbers. That these people knew what Dignity Vessels were gave Coop hope that less time had passed than he feared.
“What kind of trouble on the surface?” Coop asked.
“The excess energy,” the woman said quickly, before Bridge could answer, “creates death holes.”
Or at least, that was what Perkins thought she said. Perkins ran the sentence through the computer as well and got a similar translation. Bridge watched it all with curiosity.
“Death holes?” Coop asked. “Sink holes?”
“A wave of energy blows through the ground, like a geyser,” the woman said, “creating a tunnel. Vaycehn occasionally loses entire neighborhoods to these tunnels.”
“Vaycehn?” Coop asked.
“It’s what they call Venice City,” Perkins said, with an edge in her voice.
Coop didn’t want to explore that edge, not at the moment, anyway.
“You’re convinced these death holes are caused by something down here?” Coop asked the woman.
“We know it. A big hole opened when your ship arrived.”
Coop frowned. Clearly something had malfunctioned. “Why didn’t you contact the Fleet?”
The woman looked at Bridge. He shook his head slightly. She put her hand on his for just a moment, as if to keep him silent.
“Because,” the woman said after a moment, “until your ship arrived, we thought the Fleet was just a legend.”
“What?” Coop asked.
The woman looked a little sheepish. “We found some ruined Dignity Vessels before. I’ve dived some of the wrecks. But I never thought I’d see a functioning ship with a functioning crew.”
“Because we’re a legend,” Coop said.
“No one knows much about you,” she said. “We thought you traveled in large groups, going from section to section, distributing justice.”
“We do,” he said.
“But no one has any evidence of that. What we do know is garbled, lost to time and mythology. Some places claim you exist and you helped them create their civilizations. Some say you never existed. Others claim you were rogue agents fleeing a dying government, and that you stirred up trouble wherever you went.”
The hair on the back of his neck had risen. How long did it take for the Fleet’s exploits to get lost?
“What do you say?” Coop asked.
“I say that your Dignity Vessels have turned into the greatest mystery of my life.”
“A mystery I can solve for you,” he said.
She shrugged, as if she didn’t want to commit to the idea. “I don’t see a Fleet here,” she said. “You’re just one ship.”
“We were damaged,” he said. “We came here for repairs.”
True enough, but not complete. He didn’t want to give her the full answer—not yet.
“Alone?” Bridge asked.
She put her hand on his again, as if to remind him that she was asking the questions.
“The base should have been active,” Coop said. “We only left a month ago.”
Bridge shook his head. “That’s not possible.”
“Shut up, Bridge,” the woman said. She didn’t seem surprised by Coop’s words. Bridge did. She knew more about Dignity Vessels and the Fleet than she was admitting.
“How long has this base been abandoned?” Coop asked.
Bridge crossed his arms and leaned back, as if he expected to be consulted on the question. The woman ignored him.
“We don’t know exactly,” she said.
“But you have a guess,” he said.
“No, I don’t,” she said. “I don’t guess.”
He appreciated that. “What do you know?”
She took a deep breath. Her face was filled with compassion. She turned to Perkins.
“I hope you can translate this accurately,” she said.
“I’ll try,” Perkins said, or at least, that was what Coop thought she said. Some of the words in the outsiders’ language did sound familiar. He understood now why Perkins had been so cautious. Sometimes familiar words led to greater misunderstandings than unknown words.
“What we know is this.” The woman spoke slowly, obviously doing so to make it easier for Perkins to translate. “The city of Vaycehn is the oldest known city in the sector. Vaycehn has been here, in one form or another, for five thousand years.”
“No,” Coop said before he even realized he had spoken. He made himself breathe. Maybe Perkins had mistranslated. “The city above was called Venice. Venice City. It was the first settlement ever on Wyr.”
Wyr was the name the Fleet had given this planet.
“Wyr.” The woman repeated the word without waiting for the translation, and then nodded. “Yes. We’re on Wyr.”
“Venice City,” he prompted.
“The oldest known settlement here is in the area with the worst of the death holes,” the woman said. “It’s five thousand years old.”
“So far as our records show,” Bridge said, “this place has always been called Vaycehn.”
“Bridge, enough,” the woman said. There was warning in her voice, and a toughness to her posture. Coop was beginning to understand why they called her Boss. He wouldn’t want to make her angry.
“There’s no record of Venice City?” Coop asked.
“None,” the woman said.
“Sir,” Perkins said. “The way that language morphs, and the way that these people speak…”
Coop looked at her. So did Bridge. No one was translating for the woman called Boss, at least not yet.
“Venice City could be mispronounced, mangled, changed over the centuries through pronunciation errors,” Perkins said. “It could have become Vaycehn.”
“That’s supposition, Perkins,” Coop said. “We’re trying to figure out facts here.”
She nodded once.
But he understood her all the same. She thought—Bridge thought; hell, the woman named Boss thought—that Vaycehn had been here for at least five thousand years. If Vaycehn was a settlement placed on the ruins of Venice City, then Venice City had been built even longer ago.
The very idea made Coop’s mind hurt.
Five thousand years. How did one month become five thousand years?
“Are you sure you’re translating the numbers correctly?” Coop asked Perkins.
“The computer is confirming them,” she said.
“But you programmed it,” he said. “Could you have programmed it wrong?”
Her expression remained impassive. No flashes of anger, no sense of doubt. “Anything’s possible, sir,” she said.
Then she turned to Bridge and said something in his language.
He responded in his bad Standard. “Boss is talking about five thousand years. Fifty one-hundred-year cycles.”
Coop’s stomach clenched. He was glad he had his hands clasped together. He didn’t want the others to see them shaking.
“You’re sure of that?” he asked.
Both Bridge and the woman nodded.
“My God,” he said, and stood up. “My God.”
He walked over to the sideboard, his heart pounding. Five hundred years would have been a disaster. Five thousand was an impossibility.
Except that the anacapa drive in the station was malfunctioning, creating something called death holes. The Ivoire had all kinds of damage as well. Together both anacapa drives—one clearly malfunctioning and one that might be—had rescued the Ivoire from that fifteen-day death float, and brought it here, where it could be repaired.
But it could never ever rejoin the Fleet.
Not even if Coop wanted it to. Not even if he could figure out how to traverse foldspace to reach some point in the Fleet’s trajectory. The errors he would make in a two-hundred year timeline would make it just barely possible to catch up to the Fleet. The errors he would make in a five-hundred year timeline would make it impossible to catch the
Fleet.
He couldn’t even map the distance between the Ivoire and the Fleet with any kind of accuracy. Not over five thousand years. Not even with a working anacapa and foldspace on his side.
The Fleet might as well be a legend.
And the Ivoire had just become a ghost.
He didn’t look at Perkins. He wanted to maintain some kind of emotional control.
He needed his own people on this. Although he knew what they would find. The evidence had been there already: the language, the unbonded nanobits, the condition of the equipment.
He made himself focus.
“So you’re from Venice City?” he asked the woman as he turned around.
The woman’s expression was filled with compassion. She had an idea of what he was going through. He didn’t want her to think of him that way. He didn’t want her to feel sorry for him.
“No,” she said. “I’m not from Venice City. I am not from Vaycehn either.”
That surprised him.
“What are you doing here, then?” he asked.
Bridge started to answer but she glared at him.
“We came because of the death holes,” she said.
“Came from where?” he asked.
“The Nine Planet Alliance,” she said.
It meant nothing to him, just like she had known it would.
“Did Venice City—Vaycehn—hire you to solve this death-hole problem?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Then why are you here?” he asked.
“Because we’re trying to understand your technology,” she said. “It’s littered throughout the sector, and it’s killing people.”
Killing people. Coop shook his head. Killing people.
It was taking a moment for words to get through his brain. He was in some kind of shock. Unexpected harsh news did that.
News that led to grieving.
And he would have a lot of grieving to do. He had lost not just his friends, but his entire world.
He made himself focus on the woman’s words. He was the commander of this ship, and in his training, he learned how to get past a shocking fog. He learned how to operate even when everything seemed like it had gone wrong.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “The technology is killing people?”
The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas Page 29