City of Ruins - [Diving Universe 02]

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “Lovely,” Stone mutters.

  “Are the guides right?” I ask. “Is this a natural material?”

  “Not on any world I’ve been to,” says Bridge. “I’m guessing and we’re going to have to do studies, but I’m pretty sure these are man-made.”

  “That magically appear when a wall collapses?” Carmak asks. She seems to have perked up now that she’s eaten and had some coffee. She actually sounds intrigued now instead of overwhelmed like she had late this afternoon.

  “Yes, possibly,” Bridge says. “They formed quickly, reinforced the collapsed walls, and created the shaft where there was none. And then there’s the matter of the lights.”

  That catches my attention. The lights fascinated me from the moment we went below.

  “What about them?” Stone asks.

  “They form too. And they seem to respond to some kind of stimuli. In other words, they turn off when they’re not needed.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s a motion sensor of some kind,” I say. I explain what happened in the corridor.

  “Built into that black stuff?” Mikk asks. “This stuff is sounding more and more amazing all the time.”

  “Why shouldn’t it be?” Ilona says. “If the same people who built this built stealth tech, then of course this is amazing. Stealth tech is.”

  “Amazing in how fast it kills,” Roderick says.

  Both Mikk and Roderick, who saw a member of our team die in the Room of Lost Souls, loathe stealth tech. They’re here to conquer it, not learn everything they can about it.

  “It’s amazing how it works,” Ilona says primly, as if she disapproves of their attitude.

  I’m still not sure we’re dealing with stealth tech here, but I am sure that whoever made that black stuff had more scientific knowledge than we could pretend to have.

  Since our science is the best it has been in thousands of years and we don’t understand this stuff, that means it’s ancient science. The ancients knew so much more than we ever will. I constantly find myself in awe of them.

  “We’re here to find out whether or not those fourteen archeologists died in stealth-tech accidents,” I say. “Aside from my discovery today, did anyone learn more about that?”

  “It’s hard to find information,” says Gregory, one of the scientists. His narrow face is wan, and I wonder if he’s getting much sleep. He doesn’t like travel, although he’ll do it when he has to. He’s always the last to volunteer for an away mission and the first to volunteer to go home.

  “None of the officials want to talk to us.” He’s playing with his fork as he speaks, turning it upside down, banging the end, and then repeating the procedure. “They wouldn’t even point us to the scientific labs around here.”

  One of the other scientists, a slightly overweight man named Lentz, nods. “I finally gave up and went to the universities. Vaycehn has three, and they’re all well known. I wasn’t allowed to contact any of the science departments directly, although in the cafeteria, I ran into a scientist I knew from a few conferences. He says they’d love to meet with us, but Vaycehn has regulations about sharing potentially difficult information with outsiders, and so in order to have a formal discussion, we’d have to spend months going through channels.”

  “I hadn’t heard that part about channels until today,” Ilona says before I can ask her why we haven’t gotten all our permissions lined up.

  “What does ‘potentially difficult’ mean?” Bridge asks.

  Lentz smiles. “I asked that, too, and he answered me. Anything that could interfere with the tourist trade. The caves are the primary example because many of them are in the oldest areas of the city. People love to visit the ruins.”

  “One-point-two million visitors a year,” says Gregory, “and those are the official ones.”

  It seems he has gotten the tourist lecture too.

  “We’d be considered unofficial, even though we have a guide. We’re not here on vacation.” Gregory sounds surprised at that, as if he doesn’t understand the limiting of the word “tourist” to vacationer alone.

  “Was your friend able to tell you anything unofficial?” Bridge asks.

  Lentz’s grin grew. “Well, two old friends, you know, we’ll talk about anything.”

  My breath catches. Lentz got some information.

  “And we did. We talked about our friends, our colleagues, our research.”

  Stone sighs, as if she wants him to hurry to the point.

  He leans back in the chair and puts his hands behind his head. “My friend is researching the death holes.”

  Lentz has everyone’s attention now, and he seems to be enjoying it.

  “It seems that the Boss’s guess was right. Others have died here, all through Vaycehn’s history. In fact, one of the reasons the city center moved so much was to avoid the holes.”

  “There are that many?” Stone asks. “I thought there were only a few.”

  “All through the city’s history,” Lentz says, “areas just collapse. It’s not the weight of buildings or the ground above that causes it—although sometimes that happens too. But there are entire death hole areas in the Basin. That’s why some of the ruins are off-limits to tourists, and that’s why some of the history of the city is vague.”

  Bridge has steepled his fingers. I’m wishing I knew more detail about the five-thousand-year history of Vaycehn, like how often the city center moved and where.

  “He thinks there’s a scientific reason for all of this?” Carmak asks. Her eyes are sparkling. She’s not the same woman who was in the field this afternoon. “Besides a geologic one, I mean. Because the histories say that Vaycehn was initially built on unstable ground, and the oldest colonists had no way to know where the stable ground was. They searched until they found an area that could support their city.”

  “Sounds plausible, doesn’t it?” Lentz says. “Until you remember that humans aren’t native to this place. The colonists had enough scientific skill to travel through space, then colonize this area and begin to farm it. You’d think they could figure out rudimentary geology.”

  “Science doesn’t always follow a linear path,” says Ilona, but she’s frowning. She’s thinking about this.

  Both Mikk and Stone are restless. But I’m fascinated. I have to force myself to eat some of the food on my plate. Not even the tastes are familiar, except on a basic level—bitter, sweet, salty, bitingly spicy. I pick at what’s before me, then push the plate away.

  “Well,” Lentz says with a small shrug, “whether or not you agree with the premise for his research doesn’t matter. He started the work because he didn’t believe his own country’s history.”

  I’m glad Lentz is the one describing this. Gregory doesn’t have the people skills, and Ilona is too invested in Vaycehnese life.

  “He dug through old records and found a lot of the basic stuff you’re talking about, Lucretia. He found the measurements, as well as stuff on whether the ground is stable, whether or not there’s bedrock, how deep the solid layer goes before they find ground water, all of that kind of thing.”

  ”And?” Mikk isn’t even trying to mask his irritation at the way the scientists present things.

  “And,” Lentz says, “the old studies confirm what he suspected.”

  ”Which is?” Mikk asks.

  ”That these death holes appear in solid ground. The catacomb of caves here were created by the phenomenon that creates the death holes. And it’s ongoing.”

  ”Like volcanic activity?” Stone asks. Now she’s intrigued.

  ”Not quite,” Lentz says. “Because there’s always a history of volcanic eruptions in the past.”

  ”Maybe a groundquake, then,” she says.

  “On an unknown fault line, maybe?” Carmak asks.

  I shake my head. Even I know this. We have the capability to map tectonic plates from space. There are no unknown fault lines on any settled planet.

  I’m about to say that when Lentz shakes his head. />
  ”It’s more like an explosion from underground,” he says. “With a directed charge, made to create a hole in the surface above.”

  ”Have they gone down to check what causes the explosion?” Bridge asks,

  ”Initially,” Lentz says. “Which is why they’re called death holes.”

  “Because the investigators mummify,” Mikk says,

  Lentz shakes his head. “Because the investigators vanish.”

  ”Vanish?” I frown at him. He’s enjoying dragging this out. “What does that mean?”

  “It means that they’re never found,” he says.

  ”Does anyone search for them?” I remember how reluctant the guide was to let me down the corridor.

  ”Not after the first one or two don’t make it back,” he says. “Then they use animals to test. Usually after a dozen years or so have passed, something survives, and then it’s deemed safe. But until then, no one goes in the death holes.”

  ”Sounds like they learned about these places the hard way,” Ilona says.

  Everyone turns toward her, as if her statement is obvious.

  “I mean,” she says, “they have a protocol and a name for the phenomenon. So that means that these holes repeated, and then after a while, they needed a way to deal with them.”

  “Ilona’s right,” Bridge says. “A culture doesn’t name a phenomenon if it’s extremely rare. And it doesn’t create a protocol if the phenomenon happens once every hundred years or so. How many of these have there been?”

  Lentz shrugs. “I didn’t talk to him all day.”

  “But you found out a lot,” I say, wanting him to continue. “Does he think it’s odd that these places eventually become safe?”

  “No,” Lentz says. “He says it validates his theory, that some kind of gas or something builds up and then explodes. It then dissipates over time, and the hole becomes safe.”

  “If there was gas, it would be released into the atmosphere, contaminating the area around it,” Gregory says. “Did he find that?”

  “He’s only had two death holes to study since this became his expertise. But the records don’t show any areawide deaths.”

  “Because,” Ilona says, “they clear the areas when a death hole appears. You told us that.”

  “History tells us that,” Carmak says.

  “I’d like to know what happened the first time a few death holes appeared,” I say. Because it doesn’t have to be a gas. It could be a field. An expansion of a stealth-tech field—a different kind than we experienced in the Room of Lost Souls, but an expansion nonetheless.

  Still, I don’t say that. I’m still not willing to admit this place is tied to ancient stealth. We haven’t seen stealth tech act like that.

  Or have we?

  I turn to Gregory, whom I hired because he once specialized in stealth tech. He was one of the government scientists who tried to reverse-engineer stealth tech with Squishy.

  “When you guys were trying to re-create stealth tech in the lab,” I say to him, “did you get some localized expansion phenomena? Something that would resemble what’s going on here?”

  He sighs. He hates talking about that time. What Squishy told me in as little detail as possible was that in the two hundred years the Empire has been trying to re-create stealth tech, the program has lost ships, materiel, and people.

  When he remains silent, I add, “Squishy told me that a lot of people died while she worked on the program. I assumed they got trapped in the stealth-tech field. Is that what happened? Or were there ‘explosions’ to use Lentz’s word? Did the field expand unexpectedly?”

  “C’mon, Boss,” Roderick says, “we’ve already seen that. In the Room. The way the station just kept getting bigger.”

  “But that looked like it was falling out of the field,” Mikk says. Even though he gets impatient with scientific theory, he does remember it. Sometimes I think he’s too smart for the rest of us, which is why his patience with people who establish fundamentals before they get to the point is so short.

  “Greg?” I ask. “Did it suddenly explode?”

  “‘Explode’ is the wrong word,” he says. “Sometimes it would expand. It would be concentrated in one area, like air going through a tube.”

  “Or a narrow field coming up through the earth,” says Stone.

  Even though we’re not on the Earth, no one corrects her. We know what she meant.

  I sigh. “This isn’t evidence, you know.”

  “It’s another piece,” Ilona says.

  It is that.

  “Can you get more information from your friend?” I ask Lentz.

  “I can try,” Lentz says. “I can ask him to lunch or something. But we have to be really informal. He can lose his job.”

  “Hell, why don’t you just hire him, Boss?” Mikk says. “That’ll take care of the cloak-and-dagger stuff.”

  “I’d like to know if he has something to add before I do,” I say.

  “Besides, hiring him might cut off his access to these death holes,” Ilona says. “It’s becoming clearer and clearer that the Vaycehnese are protecting the reputation of their city, and they’re doing it at great cost.”

  “Cities do that all the time,” Carmak says. “Governments lie. They don’t want the bad stuff to get out. That’s normal.”

  “But sometimes it’s just there.” Cesar Voris, one of the historians, speaks up for the first time. He’s one of my new hires. Carmak recommended him because he’s an expert in this region of space. He specializes in ancient history, but he loves modern as well, and he spends his off time studying. I’ve never had another employee work quite that hard.

  “What do you mean, ‘there’?” Carmak asks.

  Voris shrugs. He’s a big man with a shock of white hair that makes his brown skin seem even darker than it is. His eyes are very black and very alert.

  He looks directly at me. “You said to find out what we can about the death toll in the caves, so I did.”

  “We couldn’t find anything,” Gregory says. “No one’ll talk.”

  “That’s right,” Voris says. “But we’re interested in information. History, when you come down to it. So I went to the City Museum.”

  “The director wouldn’t talk to me,” says Ilona.

  Voris folds his hands together and waits until the others stop speaking.

  “The City Museum of Vaycehn,” he says like the teacher he used to be, “is an amazing place. It has a great library, and so many fascinating exhibits, I doubt anyone could see them all in the space of a month.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Mikk says. “Don’t tease us with information and then not give it.”

  “The thing is,” Voris says as if Mikk hasn’t spoken, “the exhibits cover the history of Vaycehn as accurately as possible. There is a quick viewing area that the tourists usually go to, and indeed are directed to, being told that the rest of the place will take most of their trip to see.”

  Mikk sighs impatiently. I grab another spotted apple and turn it over in my hands.

  “But if you go in with an agenda, you can see quite a bit. I decided my agenda was the caves. The longer I was there, the more I realized I needed to know about the way the city center changed location all the time.” Voris raises his bushy white eyebrows and looks at all of us, individually, before going on.

  Now Stone sighs.

  But Voris doesn’t seem to care. “So I wandered, found an old ruin actually brought into the museum intact—that was interesting—and then found that each display has an information button. You push it and a holographic guide tells you everything you want to know and a few things you don’t. If you push it twice, you can get a hard copy of the transcript, and if you push it three times, you can download that transcript to your own personal system, so long as you sign a few waivers promising not to use it for profit in any way.”

  “What did you learn?” Mikk asks.

  “That the fourteen archeologists were mentioned for precisely the reason that D
r. Stone said. Because they’re famous throughout the sector and it would look bad for them to just disappear here.”

  Stone nods. She clearly feels vindicated.

  “But,” Voris says, “I also learned that hundreds of Vaycehnese have died over the centuries in those so-called death holes. And for generations, the caves were off-limits to the Vaycehnese because people would die in weird little pocket areas.”

  I take a bit of the spotted apple. It’s sweet and sour at the same time. I could easily become addicted to these things.