I look at them all. They each have food in front of them. Some have water. The hotel brought alcohol, but I made them take it back. I need everyone thinking as clearly as possible tonight.
I put my hands on the back of my chair.
“All right,” I say. “I’m sorry I was so mysterious with some of you earlier, but I wanted everyone to hear this story all at once. We found a Dignity Vessel today. Or rather, it found us.”
I then tell the story of the Dignity Vessel’s arrival. Everyone looks riveted, even those who have heard it before. The Six watch me as if the entire event is news to them as well.
Maybe they feel like I do—what happened with the Dignity Vessel seems like a very long time ago. The adventure of leaving the cavern somehow overtook the miracle and made us feel like we’ve gone through something horrible.
I pause and take a sip of water before I discuss what’s been bothering me since we got out; the fact that we didn’t feel the groundquake at all. But Lentz, the scientist who had the university ties that initially got us so much information, takes my momentary silence as an opening for conversation.
“I timed it,” he says.
“Timed what?” Ilona asks, with a sideways look at me. The sideways look is permission to have the conversation even though she has a hunch I’m not done.
I don’t let my expression give permission one way or the other. I take another sip of my water and look at Lentz.
“The groundquake,” he says. “About how long into your dive do you estimate the ship arrived?”
He’s already figured out what we suspected: the ship itself caused the death hole.
DeVries glances at me. I don’t answer. DeVries was monitoring the time more than I was. He tells Lentz to the minute when the ship arrived.
“It corresponds,” Lentz says. “I have a hunch that’s the exact moment.”
“And we know the death hole caused the groundquake and not the other way around?” Lucretia Stone asks. After our initial wrangling over control, she’s been quite easy to work with. Of course, she’s been focusing on the archeology, while I’ve been worried about the stealth-tech areas and the room.
In fact, I’ve somewhat lost track of the archeology, not that the ground has interested me much anyway.
“We don’t know anything,” Ilona says quickly, apparently afraid there will be some kind of verbal tussle.
“We don’t even know how the ship got down there,” DeVries says. “One minute the pad was empty; the next it had a ship on it.”
“Was it there all along?” Bernadette Ivy asks. She has been the most annoying member of our team. She continues to scrub her hands raw. If I could, I would replace her. But I can’t do anything about her.
“No, it wasn’t there all along,” I say, setting down my cup of water. “I told you. Rea was standing on that pad seconds before the ship arrived.”
She flushes. “I mean, we know stealth tech opens other dimensions. Was the ship on the pad in the other dimension?”
We don’t know that stealth tech opens other dimensions. I am about to say that when DeVries speaks up.
“The ship was cold,” he says. “Extremely cold. It came from space. Somewhere.”
“And magically appeared.” Gregory, one of the other scientists, taps a finger against his chin as he considers this. “There are no holes in the ceiling, nothing opened up?”
“No, nothing opened up,” Kersting says. He sounds as annoyed as I felt a moment ago. But Gregory’s question is a good one. If the mountain had an opening that allowed ships to come in, then it would have been reasonable to assume that the opening activated, causing the death hole.
“I didn’t look up,” I say. “Did anyone else?”
“I did,” Kersting says, still sounding annoyed. “That was my first thought. Maybe the ship came in from somewhere. But it didn’t.”
“He’s right,” Seager says. “One moment the pad was empty. The next, we had a ship. It just . . . materialized, for lack of a better word.”
“And you felt no energy release?” Gregory asks.
I shrug, trying to remember. I was more focused on the ship itself than any feeling of power in the room.
“If that ship wasn’t there, and then it was, there was some kind of displacement,” Lentz says. “Even if it was just air molecules moving around.”
Normally I find speculation fascinating, but not today. It’s a sign of my continued exhaustion.
“I haven’t finished,” I say.
They all look at me. Ilona puts up a hand just slightly, as if she’s afraid someone will interrupt me. I wonder if I look volatile or intolerant or if everyone just knows to avoid me when I’m tired.
“We had no sense at all of the groundquake,” I say. “We were surprised by it.”
“‘Surprised’ is an understatement,” Kersting says, then looks at me hesitantly, as if he knows he shouldn’t have spoken.
“We didn’t feel anything, not even when that ship appeared,” Rea says. “The floor in that room didn’t vibrate at all. Nothing fell. We had no idea anything happened until we got to the edge of the stealth tech.”
“Then it looked like someone had set off a bomb in the corridor,” Seager says.
I don’t mind their input. It reinforces what I had to say.
“You didn’t feel that groundquake?” Stone asks. “You’re kidding, right? It should have been more intense underground.”
“We felt nothing,” I say.
“But we did,” Roderick says. “That was the scariest five minutes of my entire life.”
“They were just outside the stealth tech,” I say.
“We saw it,” Quinte says. “But we were inside the stealth tech too. We watched the rocks fall outside the tech, and didn’t feel a thing. It was surreal.”
“The rocks fell silently, too,” Al-Nasir says. “We didn’t hear anything.”
“It sounded like we were under attack,” Mikk says. “With everything falling? It was thunderous.”
We stare at each other. No one says anything for a few minutes.
We’ve always known that stealth tech creates its own environment, and that only some of us can survive in that environment. But we assumed—or at least, I assumed—that there was no difference between a stealth-tech area and a non-stealth-tech area for those of us with the marker.
If there was noise outside the stealth-tech area, I thought anyone with the marker inside the stealth tech could hear that noise. I figured that the marker simply leveled out the stealth-tech environment.
But I’m no scientist, and I hadn’t thought it through. If people without the marker die inside stealth tech because time speeds up for them, then the environment is different. And stealth tech is supposed to be a kind of cloak for Dignity Vessels.
Only “cloak” isn’t right, because if it were a cloak, then that ship should have been on that pad the whole time.
Instead, the ship came in from somewhere else.
I put a hand to my forehead, sigh, and finally slip into my chair.
“You know,” I say after a moment, “I thought the day that we found a working Dignity Vessel was the day all of our questions would be answered. I never expected it to create more questions.”
“Tougher questions,” Bridge says.
“Fascinating questions,” Lentz says.
“Deadly questions,” Ivy says, and looks pointedly out the window.
“Well,” I say. “We have a lot of work to do. We have to review all the material that my team brought out of that room. We have to investigate that death hole, somehow. And we have to keep the Vaycehnese from finding out about that vessel.”
“They have to let us stay in Vaycehn first,” Ilona says.
“Are they kicking us out?” I ask.
“If there are more groundquakes or death holes, yes,” she says. “I’m not sure I can do anything about it.”
“Then maybe we’d better tell them we know what’s causing the death holes,�
�� Stone says.
“We don’t know,” I say hastily. “And until we do, we can’t make that promise.”
“But we can tell them we have an inkling,” she says.
I shake my head. “We can’t talk to anyone outside this room about that Dignity Vessel or the stealth tech. We know less now than we did a few hours ago. And my greatest fear is that by the time we get back down there, that Dignity Vessel will be gone.”
“You’re in no shape to go back down there,” Bridge says to me. Then he looks at the Six. “None of you are.”
“We’re the only ones who can do it,” Kersting says, surprising me. I would have thought he would never want to go down there again.
“I think it’s pretty important that we keep going,” Quinte says, also surprising me. “People are dying up here, and I think Lentz is right. I think it’s not a coincidence that the ship returned at the same time the death hole formed. I think we might actually be able to help Vaycehn solve a centuries-old problem.”
I look at all of them. They seem like they have more energy than they had at the start of this meeting.
“You always preach caution, Boss,” Tamaz says. “We can’t dive tired. You all are exhausted.”
“We are,” I say. “And this whole incident has shown me how ill prepared we are to deal with land problems. I need a lot from you in the next few hours. I need someone to coordinate efforts on the ground here, so that we’re better prepared for our underground adventures. I need permission from Vaycehn to stay. I need everyone to review the information we brought to the surface. And I need the Six to rest before we go back down.”
“When will we go back?” DeVries asks.
I shrug. “The Vaycehnese have to clear those corridors first. Any ideas on that?”
I direct that last to Ilona, but Bridge is the one who answers. “I didn’t go through the city,” he says. “That Bug driver will be working on his own to clear the debris.”
“That’s why he took the money,” I say.
Bridge smiles. “Yep. He’s not going to share it with anyone.”
“Is that safe for him?” Mikk asks.
“I get the sense he’s done work off the books before,” Bridge says.
“I hope so,” Mikk says. “Because it’s a mess down there.”
Ivy stands and looks out that window. “It’s a mess everywhere,” she says.
Except in that room. With the Dignity Vessel.
And I can’t wait to return.
* * * *
THIRTY-FOUR
A
t the end of Coop’s thirty-six-hour cutoff, the outsiders had not K I returned.
He sat in the captain’s chair, hand on his chin, elbow resting on the chair’s solid arm, as he stared through the screens to the sector base. Most of the particles had settled, although they still coated everything.
The room was empty and mostly dark.
It looked abandoned. He felt abandoned, which surprised him. He had expected the outsiders to return. The fact that they hadn’t seemed quite odd to him.
If he had been a betting man—and he wasn’t—he would have laid money on their return within eight hours or, on the outside, ten. What he understood of the body language of their leader (if, indeed, she was their leader), was that she was intrigued by the ship, by the room, by everything.
Maybe the rest of the team had to drag her out because their time underground was limited. Maybe they had left the entire region.
Or maybe a commander outside the sector base had ordered them to proceed with more caution.
His mistake, Mae would tell him if he gave her the chance, was that he expected other cultures to behave like his. For all he knew, they operated on a weekly cycle instead of an hourly one. Maybe they were more cautious than he was. Or maybe their goal hadn’t been exploration at all. Maybe they had some other goal for the sector base, and the arrival of the ship had ruined that goal.
Coop needed to send in his team. He had waited long enough.
Dix had spent the last hour looking pointedly over his shoulder at Coop and then staring at the screens. Coop hadn’t moved; he’d been studying those screens for at least two hours now. And he’d noted how many times his quite superior bridge crew had given him surreptitious looks.
Maybe the sector base itself could help with the decisions Coop needed to make. The repair room might have sophisticated ways to track the Fleet.
The Fleet always traveled on the same trajectory. The problem was that the Fleet’s mission determined its timetable. The Fleet’s mission, which it had adhered to without fail since it left Earth, was to support the underdog, fight the right battles, help individuals, nations, and entire regions of space become self-sufficient, able to protect their own peoples without hurting others.
The mission was vague, and sometimes the Fleet ended up on a side it didn’t want to be on, but mostly it had worked. And when the Fleet felt the peoples, the nations, the regions of space were stable, it moved on, secure in the knowledge that it had done its job well.
Sometimes, to do that job well, the Fleet had to stay longer than expected. Sometimes on a random stop for supplies, the Fleet would encounter a group that needed their help. Sometimes, no one they met needed help, not for years.
So the Fleet’s location along its chosen route would be a suggestion, a hope, rather than an actual schedule. And the stragglers could catch up, because the anacapa worked by folding space and could, with the right calculations, fold the Ivoire within a few years (and a few light-years) from the Fleet itself.
If the anacapa worked. If the Ivoire retained enough power to travel that far. If they didn’t get attacked by those outsiders.
If, if, if.
Coop stood up. He couldn’t think about that yet. He needed to focus on now, which meant repairing the Ivoire and figuring out exactly what had happened here. Then he would worry about catching up to the Fleet.
“I guess we send in our exploratory team,” he said to the entire crew.
“Why are you hesitant?” Dix asked.
“I keep expecting the outsiders to return,” Coop said.
“If they do, our people can take care of them,” Perkins said.
Coop resisted the urge to shake his head. Sometimes Perkins’s inexperience grated on him.
“We don’t want our people to take care of them,” Anita said, using a tone that was a bit too patronizing. “We want to stay out of their way for a while, figure out what they’re up to.”
“We could talk to them and figure that out,” Perkins said, and Coop finally understood what was behind her seemingly naive comments. She wanted to work too, just like everyone else. Only she had no work to do, not yet. Her job in first contact was to figure out the language and start the communication.
“We might not ever talk to them, Perkins,” Coop said gently. “They may never know that we exist.”
She sighed, but didn’t respond to that.
“I’ll summon the exploratory team to the conference room so you can brief them,” Dix said.
“I asked Layla to pick the scientists for the team,” Coop said. “Make sure I get their background information before that briefing. I want to know strengths and weaknesses.”
“Already have them on file,” Dix said. “I’ve had it for hours.”
Coop bit back a defensive response. He knew the bridge crew thought they should have gone into the sector base much earlier. The fact that the outsiders hadn’t returned made the bridge crew feel their point of view was the correct one.
But he knew that waiting had been right. He wished that the outsiders had returned so that he would know what they were doing.
Instead, he would have to warn the exploratory team to monitor the door, so that they could sprint for the ship if the outsiders returned.
He wanted the first contact on his terms, if there was going to be a first contact at all.
* * * *
THIRTY-FIVE
E
ar
ly the next morning, I head back to the caves. I take Bridge with me. Bridge has been the one talking with the Bug driver. I figure Bridge can continue talking with him. These Vaycehnese and their unwillingness to deal with women have driven me crazy so far, and I don’t want to fight that today.
I’ve sent Ilona to work with the Vaycehnese government to get us back into those caves as quickly as possible. She’s also supposed to argue for letting our experienced team members help with the groundquake/death hole emergency. But I have another reason for getting them involved. I need the scientists and archeologists to see that death hole up close.
City of Ruins - [Diving Universe 02] Page 19