City of Ruins - [Diving Universe 02]

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “We never really tied those readings to stealth tech,” Roderick says.

  “And these readings are significantly different,” Mikk says. “The group has been studying them for more than a week.”

  “They’re similar,” I say.

  “They’re similar the way light and sound are similar. They’re both waves, but they’re not the same thing.” Mikk’s education is showing, and he doesn’t even realize it.

  I shake my head. “That’s a specious analogy. These readings are similar in ways I don’t like. It’s as if this field is fresher than the one near the Room. Or more active.”

  “Or stronger,” says DeVries. He’s come closer to us, apparently wanting to hear the argument. “Whatever’s down that corridor, it’s powerful.”

  “And it might be behind that door. The source. Think of that,” Roderick says.

  “I do,” I say. “Then I remember that through another door was a seemingly empty room where both my mother and my friend died. I don’t want to risk both of you.”

  “What if this isn’t stealth tech?” Mikk asks. “Then we’re risking all of you.”

  “It’s stealth tech,” I say. “I can hear it.”

  They look at me. No one except the few of us who can hear stealth tech understands what I mean. Not all of the Six can hear it. I’m not sure what the difference is, but it’s an important one.

  And I think it’s a good, nonscientific way to recognize stealth tech—at least for people like me.

  Someone behind me drops an equipment box. We all jump. The sound echoes in the enclosed space.

  “Risk is what we signed on for,” Rea says. He has gained a lot of confidence in the past few weeks. “We’re going in.”

  “Maybe we should tether,” Mikk says to me. “So we can pull you all out if there’s a problem.”

  I shake my head. “If there’s a problem, then the tether might decay before you realize we’re in trouble. I’m not sure how far the field extends. It might only be a few meters, but it might be more than that.”

  Mikk frowns at me. He’s right. We need some kind of backup.

  I say, “Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll station two divers at the first junction. Two more near the door, and then three of us will go inside—provided we can open it, of course. If we can, one will remain near the door, recording, while two of us start mapping.”

  “I don’t like it,” Roderick says.

  “I know,” I say because I can’t say what I’m thinking, which is, I don’t care what you like. This is what we’re going to do. “It’s our best option.”

  “Your best option,” one of the guide says loudly, “is to go home.”

  That would be true of most anyone else. But I have no real home. Just a mission.

  I’m not sure how the others feel, and I’m not going to ask them. They did sign on, and they will do the work.

  And I hope—no, I pray—that each one of us will come out alive.

  * * * *

  TEN

  A

  ge and time have warped the door shut. It takes all five of us to pry m I the edges away from the frame, but once we do, the door moves with surprising ease. I pull on the lever, and the door squeals open.

  As it does, lights go on. Red lights at first, flaring like warning lamps, and then they turn green before they fade to white.

  Lights turn on in the corridor as well—along the floor, though, where I hadn’t thought to look. A quick check makes me realize that these lights are recessed. There was no way to locate them under the flaked particles until they revealed themselves.

  The lights coming on scared the two at the junction. They use the comm to see if we’re all right, and I reassure them. Only after we sign off do I realize they also want to know what has gotten loose. They’re so untrained they think someone else has turned on the lights, not that the door triggered them.

  I bite back irritation and peer inside.

  What faces me is not a room, but a cavern. And it’s not empty. It’s filled with equipment. Old equipment that’s slowly powering up. I can hear the whines as it restarts, see the lights on the consoles flicker on, watch as screens sparkle to life.

  Rea curses.

  DeVries makes a sound of awe.

  I make no sound at all. I’m staring at the wording on the floor.

  It’s in Old Earth Standard, a language I’ve been learning because it’s the language of the Dignity Vessels.

  I flick the comm inside my suit, hailing Roderick and Mikk. I’ve never tried to communicate from this deep in the corridors before, and I’m not sure when the two men will get the message—if ever. But I have to send it.

  “It’s a gold mine,” I say. “But you have to stay away. I’m pretty sure now that we’re in a stealth-tech field.”

  And if we are, that message could be lost to time. Or it could be delivered in a blink of an eye.

  “Ilona was right, then,” Rea says.

  I nod. And stare. And wonder how the hell I’m going to keep this secret from the Vaycehnese, and their tourist board, and their publicity machine.

  Because the moment they announce a grand discovery, then it’ll go out through the sector. Eventually the Empire will figure out what’s here.

  Eventually, they’ll try to take it over.

  And then we’ll have the fight I’ve been expecting. The fight I’ve been preparing for. The fight I want to avoid as long as possible.

  The interior of this chamber is huge—too big to be called a room. It goes on as far as the eye can see. The ceiling is domed. The walls, the floor, everything is covered with that black material, and here it hasn’t flaked.

  We continue to follow the rules, mostly because I’m scared of the traps that lie within. I think of the way the lights came on, and I wonder what else we can trigger—and if that trigger will be harmful, even to those of us with the marker.

  I make Kersting take samples from the walls and the floors to see why this area is different than the exterior. I want as much information as possible.

  To that end, we plan to map and record every centimeter. We won’t make it in one dive—this place is bigger than some cities. We also won’t touch the consoles—I’m afraid of triggering something—or the screens. We just look and wave our cameras over each section; then we describe.

  For the first time, I miss the scientists. I want their on-scene analyses, something I won’t get until we go above ground.

  We’re timing this dive, like we time all the others, even though I want to stay for the entire day. No one knows the effect of stealth tech on people with the marker, so we are limiting our exposure.

  Ivy suggested this the night before we got in the door, and I agreed with her then. I knew I wouldn’t once I was inside, and I was right. Even though the field readings—whatever they are—are stronger than anything we’ve ever seen, I don’t feel any effects.

  Neither do the Six.

  But they’re not experienced, and I tend toward the gids—something that happens when oxygen is low. There is no one to monitor us but ourselves, always a dangerous situation, and if we all get the gids, we will make bad choices.

  The bad choice that looms is my own. I want to go deep into this chamber. I want to see how far it extends. I want to know everything about it now, not weeks from now. I want to know what it is, what it’s used for, and why it was abandoned.

  For now, I have to satisfy myself with what I can see from the area near the door. Two dozen consoles, linked screens along the walls, and chairs built into the floor.

  There is nothing in the middle of the chamber except clear floor—no stains, no markings, nothing. Around the consoles, instructions written in Old Earth Standard in large letters. I recognize only one word.

  Danger.

  I would have expected nothing less.

  The consoles seem uniform except for one about ten consoles down. That one I can’t examine yet. From a distance, I note that it’s bigger and has more buttons, but that�
�s all I can see.

  That the consoles have buttons surprises me. There are flat areas, like we have, areas that imply a touch command. But the buttons suggest that to make things work, someone must press them or move them or toggle them, which I think is terribly inefficient. Over time, the switch itself can decay and make errors.

  Another reason not to let anyone touch the consoles. We do record as many as we can from top to bottom, examining the sides and the casing, lingering on the words so that the team outside this room can translate for us.

  After we finish the first and second consoles, we’re out of time. As I stand, the screen above me flickers to life, and I worry that we’ve somehow turned it on.

  What I see is an image of space. At least, I believe it’s space. I’m not sure where or when, for that matter. I don’t recognize any of the stars. I have never seen the placement.

  “What the hell is it?” Rea asks from behind me. I turn a little, about to explain, when I see what he’s looking at.

  He’s looking at a different screen—the one over the big console. Numbers scroll across it.

  “I can’t record it,” DeVries says. “Can I get closer?”

  “No,” I say, but the word is hard to utter. I understand his impulse. I want to record too.

  Screens farther down the wall have activated as well. One shows the corridor we just left (at least, I think it’s that corridor), and another shows blackness growing on some rock.

  I curse softly.

  “What’s the matter, Boss?” DeVries asks.

  “I just want to get closer,” I lie. I don’t want to tell him that I think we’ve done something here, something that might be irreversible.

  My stomach is queasy and I’m feeling light-headed. I get that way when I’m nervous. I also get that way when I’m low on oxygen, before the gids start.

  I still hear the humming, but it seems more focused—not singing, exactly, but concentrated, as if someone has compressed the sound.

  “We have to go,” I say.

  “But it’s just getting interesting.” That from Kersting, who usually hates the long dives.

  “It is,” I say, “and it’ll be interesting tomorrow. Maybe by then, we’ll know what some of these readings say.”

  The entire team groans, but they obey. I make them leave the chamber single-file. I pull the door closed behind us, then press it to make certain that it shut tightly. If that door is a protection between the corridor and the chamber, I want it at full strength.

  Then we walk down the corridor. The moment we get past the area where the postdocs died, I send all the information from my comm links back to Mikk, with instructions to have him leave immediately and get the downloads to the scientists.

  The other downloads can come out with us. But we need the scientists working hard before our evening meeting. I need some sense of what’s going on here.

  I need to know if we’ve done something wrong.

  * * * *

  ELEVEN

  I

  think this is where they built the Dignity Vessels,” Ilona says. She’s set up a holoreplay system in the large conference room, and she’s actually using an old-fashioned pointer to tap an image of the center of that chamber.

  The rest of the team is scattered around the table. As usual, the hotel has given us a fantastic spread of food. If I’m not careful, I might actually gain weight on this job.

  “Dignity Vessels came from Earth,” Ivy says. “Everyone knows that.”

  “But we’ve never been able to adequately explain how they got out here,” Ilona says. “Maybe the specs were brought here, and the vessels were built here.”

  “Underground?” Bridge asks. “Not likely.”

  “Maybe there’s another way out,” Ilona says. “From what I can guess, that chamber is deep in the mountain. Maybe there was an opening like the one we went down, and maybe it closed.”

  “Or maybe this place has a different function,” I say, “one we haven’t yet figured out.”

  Ilona shakes her head. “The words ‘vessel’ and ‘assemble’ are everywhere.”

  “And so is the word ‘repair,’” Gregory says. “Maybe this is just a maintenance hub.”

  “Have you found the phrase ‘Dignity Vessel’ yet?” I ask.

  “No,” Ilona says. “But it’s only a matter of time.”

  I look away from her. “Anyone recognize that section of space that appeared on the screen above us?”

  “We can’t even pinpoint it,” Bridge says. “It’s not in our database or in the Vaycehnese’s or in the sector’s either. It’s unknown.”

  “And the numbers?” I ask.

  “You didn’t get a good enough look for us to examine them,” Ivy says.

  I know that, but I had hopes.

  “What about the console? Any idea what it does?”

  “The words are shorthand,” Ilona says, setting down her pointer and returning to the place at the table. “Like we would have on a child’s console. ‘On,’ ‘Off,’ ‘Start,’ ‘Stop,’ that kind of thing. But nothing that suggests what comes on or what starts and what stops.”

  “The intriguing word is in the middle,” says Gregory. ‘“Open.”‘

  “I didn’t find that intriguing,” Lentz says, speaking up for the first time since the meeting started. “What I found intriguing was the blinking light over the word ‘automatic.’ Isn’t the entire place automated? What does that mean?”

  I lean back in my chair. “I don’t know. I was hoping you guys would know by the time we had the meeting.”

  “This isn’t guesswork,” Voris says. “We must be precise. You know that, Boss. You’re the one who drilled that into us.”

  Once again, the soft-spoken man makes the best point. I sigh and get up. I can’t sit long.

  “We know that the team has suffered no ill effects from the dive,” Roderick says.

  “That have shown up yet,” Ivy says. “We don’t know what long-term exposure does.”

  I nod. I’ve had us checked by medics, our biologists, and several scanners, in addition to the Business’s decontamination chamber. So far, we’re fine.

  I’m still not willing to risk a longer dive. But I’m going to violate space rules. I’m going to let all of us dive again tomorrow.

  “We’re going back in the morning,” I say.

  Roderick shakes his head. “Boss, you know that’s risky.”

  “I think we activated something. If we wait the standard two days between dives, we might not know what got triggered,” I say.

  “Maybe saving yourselves,” Ivy mutters.

  I let that go. For the first time in one of these meetings, I look at Stone. I expect her to take command, but she doesn’t. She’s watching something on her handheld and taking notes. It’s as if this meeting doesn’t concern her.

  And, at the moment, it doesn’t. She can’t go into the chamber. She’s effectively shut out of everything.

  “I’ll keep tomorrow’s dive short,” I say. “But I’m planning to go in every day until we have an idea what’s going on.”

  “You saw the word ‘danger’ on the floor, right?” Mikk asks.

  I nod. “But we don’t know what it refers to. And we know how old Earth systems work. If the Earthers believed the chamber was dangerous, that word would have been on the door.”

  The historians immediately concede the point. The others shrug, all except the Six, who watch me with something approaching fear.

  “Come on,” I say to them. “Enjoy this. This is probably the most important discovery any of us will ever make.”

  “And we can’t even investigate it,” Bridge says.

  I look at him. He’s sitting with the other scientists. They seem frustrated.

  “You can’t do good science with recordings,” he says. “We need to be hands-on.”

  “I know,” I say. “But I don’t know how to get you there until we determine if that field reading we’re getting is not stealth tech.”


  “It has to be,” Ilona says.

  “It doesn’t have to be anything we already know,” I say. “The sounds are different. And we’re not sure about the technology. We have to be careful.”

  “I think we’re being too careful,” she says.

  My cheeks heat. “I think it’s bad policy to determine what something is in advance. We need to go slowly.”