City of Ruins - [Diving Universe 02]
Page 7
“There’s even some images of the first mummies—people they found in those pockets and then removed. There’s an entire section of the museum dedicated to the mummies of Wyr.”
Ilona lets out a breath of air.
“My God,” Bridge says.
“You’re kidding,” Lentz says, but it’s not because he believes Voris is lying, but because he’s stunned that Voris has learned this.
“You think your colleague knows?” I ask.
“I have no idea,” Lentz says. “I’ll ask him tomorrow.”
“He probably does, but doesn’t associate it with the death holes,” Voris says. “The reason the City Museum is there is for the schools. Children parade in and out of that place on assignments all the time. The mummies are one assignment, but they’re considered a mystery. Are they the first humans who came to Wyr before the colonists, or are they native? People connect certain areas of the caves with the mummies, but not the death holes themselves.”
“But you just said that the fields in these death holes recede,” Mikk says to Lentz.
Lentz nods. “I think the people who get trapped inside move away from the area where they entered. They lose oxygen or something—I don’t know—and they die. Then when the fields recede, someone goes in and finds a mummy—not where the person originally vanished, but farther inside.”
“That’s a theory,” Stone says.
“But a good one,” Ilona says, mostly because it reinforces her stealth-tech idea.
“Wouldn’t the Vaycehnese figure out that these phenomena are related?” Mikk asked.
“Not necessarily,” Voris said. “We’re looking for something specific. They’re all looking at the various peculiarities of their home.”
“Some of those peculiarities are just accepted,” Ilona says.
“Research blindness,” Bridge says. “That’s why we try not to have preconceptions.”
I sigh. I am starting to hate that word.
“We have preconceptions,” Ivy says. She is still rubbing her fingertips together. “Maybe they’re clouding our vision, too.”
“Maybe,” I say, “but let’s listen to Cesar. I suspect he has more to tell us.”
“Oh, yeah,” Voris says. “Because there’s a modern mystery to this place.”
There are a lot of mysteries on Vaycehn, more than I want to solve, simply because I want to get away from this hot, gravity-filled planet.
“You mean besides the fourteen archeologists?” Stone asks.
“Sixteen,” Voris says. “There were sixteen.”
We’re all staring at him now. He has a slight smile on his face, and his black eyes twinkle. He looks both impish and pleased with himself.
“Sixteen?” Stone says. “We would know if two others were missing. It would be big news.”
“It wasn’t big news because they were postdoctoral students,” Voris says. “They were working on some project of their own, hoping for recognition, when they just disappeared. The guides say they never came out. They hadn’t followed instructions, had gone into an off-limit area, and disappeared.”
“Like the guides were warning us about,” Ivy says nervously.
Bridge glares at her again.
“Yes,” Voris says. “Maybe that’s why. I’m thinking we should talk to the guides, try to find out how many of their noncompliance tourists have died in those caves.”
“Do that,” I say.
“Before we start your dive?” Stone asks, as if I’m the one who has suggested something out of line.
“No,” I say.
“But what if this isn’t stealth tech?” Stone says. “What if you’re right and this is something else?”
I shrug. “Then we might die.”
Five of the Six gasp. But the divers nod. They know the risks. We face them every time we dive.
“You knew that when you signed on with us,” I say to the five. “That’s part of what we do. We take risks in dangerous places. You signed waivers.”
Half the team looks at their empty plates. Gregory takes more food, as if eating it will protect him.
I half expect someone to say that waivers aren’t the same as realizing the risks. I’ve had tourists tell me that when I take them wreck diving. Then I would keep those tourists in the ship, not allowing them to dive.
But to my team’s credit, they don’t complain. They know what they signed up for, and they’re not going to back out just because the risk has become real to them.
“You think it’s stealth tech now, don’t you?” Ilona asks me.
I’m not willing to concede that, at least not yet. But I do give her this: “I think the chances have gone up. But this could be something else. Maybe the Vaycehnese are right. Maybe this is a localized phenomenon.”
“That makes its own lights?” Bridge asks.
“There are stranger things in the universe,” I say. But not many. Things that act man-made generally are.
“Should we track the deaths?” Ivy asks, clearly not wanting to go back into the caves.
I shake my head. “The historians need to find out about Vaycehn’s earliest settlers. Take Cesar’s advice. Go to that museum. See what the prehistory stuff says. See if you can find evidence of what’s been forgotten.”
“If it’s forgotten,” Stone says, “then no one will find it.”
I smile. My business has always been about handling forgotten things.
“Forgotten doesn’t mean invisible, Lucretia,” I say. “Forgotten sometimes means misunderstood.”
“Or ignored,” Ilona says.
“Or buried,” Bridge says.
I nod. For the first time, I’m enjoying this project. I’m even looking forward to the work below ground.
Maybe that’s because diving is my element, whether it’s underground or in space. Or maybe it’s because I finally believe we’ll discover something.
Stealth tech or not, there’s something here. Something old. Something interesting.
Something unexplained.
* * * *
SEVEN
T
he dives are both easier and more difficult than they are in space. We can walk through sections, but we have trouble reaching the ceiling, where those magical lights are. We don’t float away from the area we’re examining, but we can’t pull ourselves forward, either. We have to walk, to view everything from a single perspective.
I am frustrated and fascinated. I hate the feeling of gravity, but I love mapping.
We take each section bit by bit. We examine each area for changes. The guides watch as if we’re crazy.
I bring most of my good divers down—at least in the beginning—to train the Six how to do real wreck diving. The guides have precise maps of the areas in which the deaths occurred—not just the sixteen recent deaths, but all of the deaths since the Vaycehnese started exploring their own cave system.
The guides show us these things, not to help us, but to discourage us. They want us to know how dangerous this place is, just so that we’ll give up and go home.
Which we don’t.
The deaths intrigue me. There are a lot of them—so many deaths, in fact, that the Vaycehnese forbid actual exploration by anyone and only allow tourist visits of the extreme edges. It is a sign of the Vaycehnese prejudice against foreigners that they allow any of us down here at all. Our lives are less precious than the lives of locals.
If they lose a few of us, they seem to believe it doesn’t matter—so long as there isn’t a section-wide incident. It is known throughout the section that the caves are dangerous, and anyone who goes down into them is taking a risk.
The guides think we’re foolish in our dive suits, standing in front of a smooth black wall, taking notes and talking to each other in jargon. I’m happy for the suits. Much as I hate pulling them over my sweaty skin, I love the suit’s automatic environmental controls. If it isn’t for the gravity, I can almost believe that I’m back in space, diving a particularly unusual wreck.
On the first day of the third week, I dive with the Six. We’re going to the area where the postdoc students died. It’s farther away than the areas where the archeologists have died, and Ilona argues that we should explore those areas first.
But in the time between our meeting and this dive, the historians have learned what the postdocs were working on. The postdocs believed that some kind of force created the caves—some kind of field that is part of the planet’s interior, a force that expands and just as quickly contracts. That force comes upward, like geysers on Earth or the spitting rocks of Fortuyuna.
Planets shift and change. They’re living creatures, like we are, only older, larger, and slower-moving. They adjust their comfort levels, and that causes volcanic eruptions or groundquakes or an occasional eruption of steam. Those adjustments, no matter what they are, release a lot of pent-up energy.
These postdocs believed that Wyr had a unique way of adjusting its own comfort level, a way that released energy that could be farmed. My scientists are still examining the research, trying to understand why the postdocs made that assumption, trying to figure out the energy readings (if any) that the postdocs took before they died.
But the fact that they were trying to take energy readings is more than enough for me. If the postdocs were right, then there is some kind of natural field down here. If we’re right, there’s a man-made field.
And if Ilona is right, that field is stealth tech.
So only the Six can move forward from now on.
Because we’re in an environment that’s not as hostile as space, I load the Six up with extra equipment, things I wouldn’t make them carry into a real wreck. Lots of holocameras, lots of flat vid, lots of scientific sampling equipment.
I assign Kersting the job of sampling the walls every meter or two. I make DeVries record everything. Orlando Rea is the only one of the Six who shows an aptitude for exploration, so he’s at my side. The rest must map each square meter before moving forward.
Rea and I do something I would never do in space: we explore sections of the corridor without normal backup.
I call them cursory explorations. We walk ahead to see if we find anything interesting.
We finally find something interesting about one kilometer from the place where the postdocs died. The black walls here are pitted. For the first time, the shiny black material looks old.
We bring the entire team forward, and as three of them map, DeVries records, and Kersting removes core samples, Rea and I continue down the corridor. Only now we’re going a meter at a time, using our own equipment to film each section.
I have a slight headache, which could be caused by the stress of the dive. But I pay attention, because sometimes the sound that accompanies stealth tech starts as a vibration—a throbbing, one that could, in the right circumstance, be registered as an irritation rather than a noise.
The lights here are gray. That irritates me. The other lights come from the spectrum—blue to red—but gray doesn’t fit. Finally I grab an equipment box, climb it, and wipe at the lighted area with my glove.
Something flakes onto my suit, and that section of the light turns white.
The lights here are covered with flaked bits of wall. For the first time, I’m happy for the suit. I remember Bridge’s comment from that first day: Something that small and powerful might do some harm if it gets into the lungs.
We all stop and take samples of everything—the air, the ground, the walls, and the lights. We haven’t been able to remove the lights from the walls—the lights are truly grown in—but we scrape the surfaces. Just like we scrape the ceiling and the floor.
When we come out with our flaked treasure, we use hazardous-procedure techniques to remove our suits. We have no idea how dangerous that flaked stuff is—if it’s dangerous at all.
The flaking worries everyone but me. I’m finally happy to see something new and different. I was becoming afraid that we’d explore hundreds of miles of caves and find nothing except lights and black walls.
I know now that such a worry is silly. We’re going to find something. I know it as clearly as I know my name.
We’re going to find something, and we’re very, very close.
* * * *
EIGHT
I
t takes two days.
We map that flaked corridor centimeter by centimeter. We examine each part of it.
Our scientists determine that the flakes are nothing more than particles that have come off the walls, just like I thought. Only they’re able to date those particles by comparing them to the samples taken from our very first day.
The particles are at least four thousand years older.
I say at least because Bridge says at least. He really can’t predict. When he presented the data, he reminded me that the older sections of the wall— those that formed years ago—showed no more aging than the newer sections. So he has no idea—the scientists have no idea—how long the walls stand before they start showing evidence of age.
He makes his guess based on the historical record. He knows that we have found areas that are at least three thousand years old with no sign of aging at all.
The corridor here is murky—we’ve disturbed so many particles that the air is gray—and a day ago, we started to get readings that reminded me (and Roderick and Mikk) of readings we got near the Room of Lost Souls.
My headache remains, but now I know it comes from stealth tech because I hear a low humming, as if voices are harmonizing softly. Three of the Six hear it as well.
Something is here, something strong. I almost wish it wasn’t so I can bring in a real dive team. It’s clear that the Six are out of their element. DeVries, Quinte, Seager, and Kersting are tired. Rea and Al-Nasir wonder why we have to pay so much attention to detail.
They think the minuscule is unimportant, and their impatience infects me.
I take Rea down the corridor two meters farther than we should go. I take him because that part of the corridor remains dark.
“Maybe,” he says as he turns on the lamps built into his suit, “the wall lights are completely covered in particulate.”
“Maybe,” I say, but I don’t think so. I have already trained my headlamp at the top of the wall, where the lights usually bulge out. I see no bulge. I see nothing to indicate lights at all.
I stand in the center of the corridor and wave my arms, thinking maybe the motion sensors will pick up something, but they do not. All I manage to do is swirl the particles even more. It’s as if we’re in the middle of a dust storm.
Then the light from my headlamp catches something directly in front of me. A movement. My heart starts to pound.
“Did you see that?” I ask Rea.
He turns, training his headlamp in the same direction as mine. The movement repeats and I realize it’s a reflection.
Something is blocking the corridor.
“Let’s check it out,” he says, and starts forward. I catch his arm.
Now more than ever procedure is important.
“We map,” I say, and I can hear his sigh echo through our suit comms as well as through the air. We map, we go slowly, we figure out what’s ahead.
It takes two more days before we understand that what’s ahead is not the end of the corridor, as some of the team speculated, but a door.
A door.
An old, old door without warnings, markings, or lights.
Just a latch that no one has turned in at least four thousand years.
* * * *
NINE
I
‘m going in with you,” Roderick says.
“Me, too,” Mikk says.
They stand outside the hovercraft, their suits already on. The guides watch us like we’re the science experiment. The Six stand in the corridor, holding their equipme
nt like shields.
Roderick and Mikk have seen that. They know that the Six are frightened, and they know that frightened divers make mistakes.
They also know that I’m eager, and eager divers make mistakes as well. A different set of mistakes, but mistakes just the same.
“No,” I say. “You can’t go in. We’re getting readings that remind me of the Room.”