The hotel staff is surly. While they’ve put out a spread for us, they act as if we’re being inconsiderate. Maybe we are, eating well while the city’s in crisis, expecting service in the middle of an emergency.
But the staff hasn’t gone home, nor is anyone from that staff out working with the emergency crews. Some of my people volunteered to do so. Bridge told me that as we tried to set up this meeting. I was worried that some of my team wouldn’t be available, but they all are.
The City of Vaycehn refused all outside help, even though a few of my people had expertise in ground emergencies. The Vaycehnese don’t want outsiders to see the damage that groundquakes can cause. They don’t want us to know what really happens when death holes appear.
In fact, they initially asked us to leave Vaycehn altogether.
Apparently Ilona fought that battle while she was trying to get us out of the cavern. Of course, then she was arguing that she had no idea what had happened to us and that if we were missing, then of course our people had to stay.
I have no idea how her most recent discussion has gone.
I stand while I wait for the last of my people to filter into the room. I have my back to the conference table. I’ve already eaten—in fact, I’ve eaten enough to sustain me for the rest of my life. I was starved when the hotel staff brought in the food. I ate more than I’ve ever eaten in one sitting. I think some of that is a reaction to being alive, and some of it comes from the extreme exertion.
That’s one of the reasons I don’t want to sit down. If I do, I’m afraid I’ll have trouble standing up again.
The other reason is spread out before me.
Every night, I’ve looked at the City of Vaycehn through these windows, sprawled across the hills and mountainsides. I’ve become familiar with the buildings, the skyline, the way the lights flicker.
Tonight the lights are in different places. The lights move, and they don’t flicker. They’re dimmer than they’ve been, because the air is still filled with dust.
In fact, a dust cloud still hovers over the edge of the city where the death hole blew an opening in the ground and swallowed an entire neighborhood.
One of the hotel’s waiters told me that they believe fifty are dead. “But,” he said, “in cases like this, the numbers always climb.”
The number of wounded is staggering—in the hundreds, maybe a thousand or more. For a city that is prepared for groundquakes, these numbers surprise me.
The staffer told me that the death rate used to be a lot higher than it is now. Then the others shushed him and got him out of the room.
I thought of those numbers. I’m still thinking about them.
When I take tourists on dives, they complain about the danger. They hate the lack of gravity. They hate carrying their own environment.
I love it. I love the solitude, the self-sufficiency. Yes, I might die out there. But in some ways, the possible deaths in space seem merciful compared to the ones that happened here today. Crushed by rock. Suffocating beneath a building. Melted or evaporated or something equally horrible by the explosion of the death hole itself.
I shudder, then sigh.
I want out of here. I hate being on the ground.
At the same time, I want to stay forever—or at least until we can take the Dignity Vessel with us.
“Everyone’s here, Boss,” Ilona says.
I turn. Everyone is here, and they’re not in their usual positions. Ilona sits near my right hand. Bridge sits to my left. The Six sit near each other, and look so exhausted that I’m afraid they’ll pass out before the food reaches them.
Some of the archeologists look tired, too. Mikk has deep circles under his eyes. Roderick lifts his water glass slowly. His arms must hurt like mine do.
Only a handful of people seem all right. Tamaz seems relieved that he hadn’t accompanied us below. I’m relieved, too. While he’s an excellent diver and pilot, he wouldn’t have been able to lift the rocks the way Roderick and Mikk did.
The scientists look all right as well, if a bit worried. Some of them volunteered to help with the rescue efforts—one of them even has medical training I did not know about—and they were very angry at the rebuff.
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. “T
hat 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
At 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.
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