He shook his head. “I was thinking we could scrub the particles off the ship’s exterior now that the outsiders are gone. You think it’s safe to do that?”
Yash shrugged. “The preliminary tests came back that the substance is harmless. Essentially, the particles are the same material as the walls, so far as we can tell. I think it’s a bit of a gamble to scrub the ship, but not a major one.”
“Scrub it,” Coop said.
Yash entered the commands. At least that part of the ship was working. It scaled the particulate matter off its hull in a matter of seconds. More particles floated through the air, but the image on the screens was clearer than it had been just a moment ago.
The repair area was still dim. The lights had faded from their normal brightness to something that looked weak and grayish. Maybe that had something to do with particulate cover on the lights themselves. Coop couldn’t know that without a clearer view.
As the particulate matter settled down, he noted that the equipment closest to the exits appeared to be running. He could see lights and some of the screens above the control panels. But as he looked farther into the distance, farther away from the main door, he couldn’t see anything. The depths of the repair room seemed particularly dark.
“I still can’t get the systems to talk to each other, Coop,” Yash said. “I don’t think the problem is on our end. I seem to be making an exterior request, but nothing is coming back at us.”
He nodded, then folded his hands behind his back.
He was going to have no choice, then.
Someone was going to have to venture into that room.
~ * ~
TWENTY-ONE
“Boss? Come in. Boss?”
The moment we step outside the door, I hear Fahd Al-Nasir in my comm links. His voice is tense and strangled, as if he’s holding back an even greater emotion.
“Boss? Orlando? Elaine? Anyone?” That’s Nyssa Quinte. There’s no strangulation in her voice. Just full-on panic. “Someone?”
“I’m here,” I say, and I actually hear a sigh of relief, even though I can’t tell whose it is.
The corridor seems the same. I can’t tell what’s different. There are no particles floating here. The lights are as dim as they were when we went in.
“Boss, we need to get the hell out of here,” Al-Nasir says. “Right now.”
“What happened?” DeVries asks.
“We’re not sure,” Quinte says, “but it’s bad. It’s really bad.”
We sprint to the junction. I’m in the lead, my heart pounding. I almost pull off my helmet to get fresher air, then change my mind. I have no idea what “bad” is.
Quinte and Al-Nasir stand exactly where we left them, at the junction between corridors that lead to the room. Everything looks the same, except the two of them.
They’re shaking, and Quinte’s face is red inside her helmet.
“What happened?” I ask.
She points down the other corridor, the one that leads to Mikk and Roderick, waiting for us. It’s dark down there, which strikes me as unusual.
“Were we inside longer than planned?” Rea asks. We all know that time fields around stealth tech can get screwed up.
“No,” Al-Nasir says. “Go look.”
The other three have caught up with us. The seven of us crowd the corridor. Seager hangs back, along with Kersting. They’re past their limits; they don’t want anything to do with another disaster.
I walk purposely down that corridor. And as I get closer, I see why it’s dark.
Chunks of the black material, bolstered by rock, have fallen down at the very place that we believe divides the stealth-tech field from the normal area.
“Good God,” I say. “Did you see this happen?”
I move closer as I walk. The closer I get, the more I realize that one of the walls has lost its integrity. In addition to the larger chunks, smaller rock and debris litter the floor.
“It got dark,” Quinte says. “I walked up to see what happened and found that.”
“It got dark all at once?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says. She sounds less panicked now, as if she was more afraid of my absence than she was of the events before us.
“So this happened quickly,” I say.
“We think so,” Al-Nasir says. “But we don’t know. We were more concerned with you.”
“We weren’t sure if we were in the only intact corridor.”
Behind me, Kersting curses.
“Are we trapped?” Seager asks.
“Not at the moment,” I say. “But we’ll have to proceed with caution.”
I stop at the dividing line. Inside the stealth-tech area, the wall remains intact. Outside looks like a disaster area.
I take a deep breath and step across that invisible line, careful to avoid big chunks of rock. I find areas on the floor to put my feet. It’s probably not safe to stand here, but I do.
Instead of a fractured wall, the smooth blackness covers everything, as if nothing happened. I look at the ceiling. It too is intact. The lighting is gone on that side, however.
“Where did this debris come from?” I ask.
“The walls,” Quinte says.
“But there’s no damage,” DeVries says.
“There was,” Quinte says. “The black stuff is already covering it over.”
“Impressive,” Rea says.
I’m thinking the same thing. The guards had described this phenomenon, but to see it is another matter entirely. The black stuff seems almost magical.
I peer ahead. The corridor is filled with rock and debris. None of it shuts off the corridor, at least as far as I can see, although some of it comes close.
My mouth suddenly goes dry. We’re outside the stealth tech. If this collapse happened throughout the corridors, then anyone in the caves could have been hit.
Could have died.
“Mikk?” I say into the comm. “Roderick? Come in, please.”
I get no response. I look at the others.
“Have you tried them?” I ask Quinte.
She shakes her head. “We were afraid to leave the stealth-tech area.”
I almost snap at her, and then I realize that their decision was the smart one. They’re inexperienced. I urge caution on my inexperienced divers. Mikk, Roderick, and I would have gone into the danger area as soon as we realized the other area was safe, but the Six didn’t know that.
They have no idea how to behave in a true emergency.
And, frankly, neither do I—not in an underground emergency, at any rate.
We can’t just go back and find another way out. This is the only way out. We’re a long way underground, and there’s no blasting our way out of it.
I step back into the stealth-tech area.
“Have you been observing this corridor?” I ask.
Al-Nasir nods. “We’ve been going back and forth. One of us would stay at the junction and the other would investigate the debris. We’d go in fifteen-minute intervals.”
In spite of myself, I smile. They did listen, after all. Their training has paid off. One of them would go forward, like a scout, then return. They’d wait for us, then the other would go out.
“Good job,” I say. “That’s exactly how you should have done it. Now, has there been any change since you discovered the problem?”
I’ve learned with tourist dives that any time you encounter something unexpected, you use the mildest word you can. While I’m thinking the debris is a possible disaster, I’m not going to let the Six know that. “Problem” is as advanced as I go.
“No,” Quinte says. “It looks the same.”
“How long ago did this happen?” I ask, even though I think I know the answer.
“About two hours ago,” Quinte says, her voice trembling.
“When the ship arrived,” Seager says to me.
“Ship?” Al-Nasir asks.
“We’ll explain in a few minutes,” I say.
I bite my lower lip, then stop
myself. We’re here because of the death holes, which we believe to be out-of-control stealth tech. The idea that the ship’s arrival had caused a new death hole had fleetingly crossed my mind, but I had quickly forgotten it in the excitement of the ship itself. Besides, I figured the death hole would be on some other part of the mountain, not causing a disturbance in the corridor.
Although there’s no death hole above that spot in the corridor.
“Have we heard anything about death holes getting filled in once they’re formed?” I ask DeVries,
“No,” he says. “From everything we know, they stay open.”
“That’s when the black stuff appears,” Rea says unnecessarily. I remember that as well.
“If the ship caused it,” Kersting says, “you’d think the damage would be worse here.”
“What’s this ship?” Quinte says to me.
“In a minute,” I say. “There was no damage here at all?”
“No,” Al-Nasir says. “Nothing.”
“Did you feel the ground shift or shake?” I ask.
“No,” Al-Nasir says.
“Hear anything funny or loud?” I ask. ,
“We couldn’t even hear you until you came out of that door,” Quinte says, as if it’s my fault. “We’ve been trying to reach you since this thing happened.”
I nod. “Seager, tell them what happened inside the room. We need all of us working from the same information.”
I don’t listen as she explains the ship’s arrival, Rea’s near-death experience, and the strangeness of the room. Instead, I step into the nonstealth part of the corridor again.
DeVries comes with me.
“You don’t think we time-shifted, do you?” he asks. “I mean, what if the stealth field from the ship was so powerful that it reacted like a bubble, changing the way we experience time?”
“If that were the case,” I say, “then the debris wouldn’t be here. The passage of time doesn’t do this.”
At least I think that’s true. I know so little about ground and gravity and the way that things work on a planet.
“Fahd,” I say to Al-Nasir. “You’re sure the black stuff reappeared on the wall while we were in the room.”
“Convinced,” he says. “We did what you said to do. We’ve recorded everything.”
I smile despite the difficulty of the situation. “Well, that will help.”
“Lapsed time was the same, then?” Rea asks from behind me.
“We don’t know,” Al-Nasir says. “We stayed inside the stealth-tech field. It seemed like time was passing at the same rate both inside and outside, but how can we tell?”
I increase the power of my comm link. “Mikk? Roderick? Are you out there?”
“If time passed differently, they could be long gone,” Rea says.
“In the Room of Lost Souls,” Al-Nasir says, “time sped up inside the stealth field. We should only have been gone for minutes.”
“That’s true,” I say, “but this might be different. The ship itself might have caused our timeline to slow down. We don’t know if the time changes are different in different environments.”
“We can’t blame it all on time,” Kersting says. “In the previous explorations, those of us with the marker haven’t moved on different timelines. When we work in a stealth field, time remains the same for us as it does for people outside the field.”
“It only speeds up or slows down if you don’t have the marker,” Quinte says, with a bit of relief.
But I don’t feel relief. Because they’re right. And if the ship didn’t change our time field, then the silence at the other end of the comm link has another explanation, one I like a lot less.
“You think the tunnel collapse is so severe that the rock is interfering with our communication?” Al-Nasir says.
I almost shake my head, but catch myself. I’m not going to let them know what’s really worrying me. If the walls collapsed all the way along, then Mikk and Roderick aren’t answering us because they can’t.
Because they’re buried under layers of rock.
~ * ~
TWENTY-TWO
An hour passed. The outsiders did not return to the room.
Coop paced the bridge, checking on his team’s work. Dix bent over his console running multiple scans of everything he could think of. He was comparing the readings he had taken of Sector Base V a month before and the readings he was getting now. Occasionally he’d run a hand over his narrow face, a nervous habit he didn’t realize he had.
Coop didn’t like Dix’s nervous tic any more than he liked the images he kept staring at through the open screens. The particles had settled, but enough of them still remained in the air to remind him of dark snow.
Yash ran the data she had received from the outsider woman’s glove. Time and time again, Yash got the same result: the glove was not as developed as anything on the Ivoire. The technology of the outsiders was, she said, not as sophisticated as the technology of the Fleet.
Which didn’t make sense to Coop. The Fleet had colonized Venice City. If the Ivoire had gone backward in time, the sector base wouldn’t even have been here. There would have been no signal to respond to.
Going forward in time would have resulted in a more advanced technology. So far as he knew, cultures grew in technological prowess. They didn’t revert.
The only conclusion he could make, and it was a just hypothesis at the moment, was that something had happened to Venice City. It had gotten conquered, maybe destroyed, maybe abandoned. Then, years later, an outside culture discovered it, one unconnected to the Fleet.
Which explained the backward technology and the clear lack of knowledge the outsiders had about the sector base.
They had seemed terrified by the ship, which no descendants of the Fleet would have been. Of course, any descendants of the Fleet would have understood that the base was designed to keep the ships running, and would have expected an occasional ship to drop in, seemingly out of nowhere.
Anita was sitting on the raised seat in front of her console. She rested her chin on one closed fist as she went through the navigational data, making sure they had arrived at the same place they had left from.
Her eyes looked sunken into her face.
Coop had already sent one member of the bridge crew away because of exhaustion. He needed to send this group away as well. They’d been working for twenty-four hours straight.
They were his best team, but that meant they were the best of the best. The other teams were equally good, just not as experienced.
He needed clear thinking—not just from them, but from himself as well.
He sank into his own chair and contacted his second officer, Lynda Rooney. “Bring your team to the bridge for a briefing,” he said.
“Yes, sir.” She sounded crisp and formal through the communications system.
Of course she did. He never gave orders like that. Usually he told her what time her crew needed to relieve his. This time, he had put her off, telling her to keep her crew rested.
Secretly, he had hoped they would come on once he solved everything, and have their usual day.
But, he suspected, usual days were a thing of the past.
“We haven’t finished digesting all of this information,” Dix said as soon as Lynda signed off.
“I know,” Coop said. “But staying here won’t help.”
“I’d like to stay until we know what’s going on,” Yash said.
Even Anita was sitting up. “I’m glad they’re coming,” she said. “We’re going to need fresh eyes on this. It’ll help us figure out what’s going on.”
“We’re going to stand down for a few hours,” Coop said.
“Forgive me, sir,” Dix said, “but I’d like to stay. We have a mystery here—”
“And we’re not going to solve it immediately,” Coop said.
“What happens when the outsiders return?” Yash asked.
“We’ll observe them,” Coop said.
&n
bsp; “Or the second team will,” Anita said, and she didn’t sound worried about that, not the way Yash and Dix did.
“Or the second team will,” Coop agreed. “We are going to treat this place as if we don’t know it and it’s potentially hostile. We’re going to follow first-contact procedures.”
“But we do know this place,” Yash said.
“Do we?” Coop asked. “It doesn’t look familiar.”
“Our people built it,” Dix said.
“They did,” Coop said. “But where are they? What’s happened to them? We don’t know any of that, and we can’t make assumptions, no matter how tempting it is.”
Assumptions had gotten the entire Fleet in trouble on Ukhanda. He suppressed a sigh. The Fleet’s diplomats had completely misunderstood the situation between the Xenth and the Quurzod. He had only just figured it out, but he figured it out in foldspace.
He couldn’t go back to Ukhanda and let the Fleet know about their mistake.
At least not yet.
Not that he could do anything about it here. The best thing he could do here was proceed with caution, finish the repairs of the Ivoire, and head back to the Fleet, letting them know exactly what had gone wrong when his linguistic and diplomatic team embedded with the Quurzod.
“You think this is a long-term mission, don’t you?” Anita asked him.
He looked at her. She sat up straight, one hand on her console as if she were bracing herself for his news.
“I think we have to operate as if it is,” he said. “Unless you people think there’s a reason for haste… ?”
Dix glanced at his console as if the information were written there. Yash sighed.
“We’re stuck here until repairs are done,” she said. “So whether we handle this like a first-contact situation or not, it won’t make any difference as to timing. I don’t think we’ll have repairs done in less than two weeks with help. And since the base seems devoid of crew, I don’t think we’re going to get that help. So double the time.”
“In other words,” Coop said. “We can go on regular rotations, and get the proper amount of sleep.”
None of the crew looked relieved by this. But Dix nodded, as if he understood.
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