City of Ruins - [Diving Universe 02]

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  He nodded. He didn’t expect her to know when his bridge team hadn’t been able to figure it out, either.

  “The strangers in the base probably touched the consoles, activating them.”

  He nodded. His team had already figured that out.

  “The activation,” she said, “includes a scan of outlying systems, looking for missed communications.”

  “That’s when the base heard our distress signal?”

  “Probably,” she said. “Then the automatic retrieval system activated, using their anacapa to power ours. At least, that’s what engineering tells me.”

  “That’s the theory at the moment,” he said. “What’s the problem?”

  She took a deep breath, as if she were uncertain. He was still not used to an uncertain Mae. He kept forgetting how fragile she was.

  “I’m not sure they received our distress signal at all,” she said. “I can’t find notice of an acknowledgment, a receipt, or even that mingling within our systems.”

  “Then how did they find us?” he asked.

  She bit her lower lip. “I think this place sent out a signal when it activated, but it wasn’t a communications signal. It was their activation beam, the anacapa, pulling in anything within range.”

  He frowned. “The system’s not built for that, Mae.”

  “I know,” she said. “But the first communication—if you want to call it that—that registered on our system was their anacapa.”

  He thought for a moment. Mae was thorough. He knew what procedures she would have run, but it was his duty to ask about them anyway.

  “You don’t think the damage to our systems prevented us from storing the communication?” he asked.

  “I’m hoping that’s the case,” she said in a voice that told him she didn’t believe it. She thought that the communication hadn’t happened.

  “But?” he asked.

  She took a deep breath. “Ever since we arrived, we’ve been trying to communicate with the sector base. I’ve redoubled the efforts since it became clear that we wouldn’t go out into the base for a while.”

  “And?” he asked.

  “And we can’t do it. We can’t reach those consoles out there, even though we’re only a few yards away. Either whatever’s broken on our side interferes with communicating with them, or something’s wrong on their side.”

  “Or both,” he said.

  “Or both,” she agreed.

  “You’ve looked at the scans of the consoles,” he said.

  She nodded. “They’re in rough shape, Coop. I’ve seen it before.”

  “You have?” he asked.

  “In our training. We had to take some ancient equipment and cobble it into an existing system. The ancient stuff had been in good repair. It was just old. The readings you got off the systems out there, they look a lot like the readings we got from the ancient equipment.”

  “I assume you double-checked those readings,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t have raw data. It was a school project.”

  Meaning it was more than a decade ago, and she’d jettisoned the information, if she ever had it.

  “Ancient,” he said, thinking of her precision with words. “Not old?”

  “Not old,” she said softly. “Time ravaged.”

  “Could other things cause that?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “You need to ask a real scientist or a very experienced engineer. My specialties are communications systems of all types, and I remember that one. I could be wrong. I probably am—at least about this.”

  “I trust you, Mae,” he said.

  She looked down. “Maybe you shouldn’t.”

  He wanted to put an arm around her, pull her close. But he didn’t. She was going to have to recover her confidence on her own.

  “I’d like you to take some of the team off the general repairs. I want them to focus on communicating with the section base. If you have to cobble something together, then do so.”

  She raised her head slowly. The frown still marred her forehead. “Do you think we won’t be able to go out there and do some work in the base?”

  “I don’t know when the first team will leave the ship,” he said. “I want to be prepared for everything. The more work we can do from in here, the happier I am.”

  She took a deep breath. “All right,” she said. “I’ll make sure we figure out how to talk to the sector base.”

  “And it can talk back,” he said.

  “Oh, it’ll talk back,” she said. “I’m just not sure we’re going to like what it has to say.”

  * * * *

  THIRTY

  T

  hey bring in a vehicle like I’ve never seen before. The Vaycehnese have special equipment for dealing with tunnel collapses and cave-ins and people trapped below ground.

  The guides couldn’t request it until they knew we were alive—a stupid rule, I think. But Bridge explains it to me.

  The entire city’s in chaos at the moment. A death hole has opened in a far section of Vaycehn, a section that has never seen death holes before. This death hole is huge, and it has swallowed an entire block. The rescue efforts are concentrated there; the bulk of the equipment is there.

  The rest of the equipment is reserved for just this kind of emergency, but it gets prioritized. The equipment goes where human life is threatened first—where the Vaycehnese know that human life is threatened—and then it goes to the other areas.

  We weren’t a priority because they hadn’t heard from us.

  No one had until I started climbing out of that damn hole. The angle of that opening made voices from below impossible to hear. And there were no guides with us. Apparently, they had been waiting on the surface until an hour or so before we were scheduled to leave. Then they returned below.

  So when the groundquake hit, our guides were above ground and nowhere near the opening. Ilona has no idea if they even tried to find us. She doubts it, but she’s checking into it.

  Of course, they admit nothing.

  They did send a message for assistance, but got none because they had no idea if we survived. Then they contacted Ilona and asked her if she wanted them to wait. They were itching to help with the rescue efforts elsewhere.

  She gave them what for. But before they even contacted her, the guides with medical training left so that they could help at the death hole.

  Apparently, that’s procedure in Vaycehn. Whenever a death hole opens, the most experienced emergency personnel and people with medical training flock to that site and help as quickly as they can.

  It’s a coordinated effort—”a beauty to behold,” Bridge said to me with more admiration than I wanted to hear. Tourists and outsiders were left to their own devices, while the locals helped each other.

  I was trembling with fury by the time I figured that out.

  Or maybe just exhaustion.

  The minute Ilona heard my voice, she ordered the guards to get the rescue equipment. They were already on it. Once they knew the outsiders were in trouble, they didn’t want to seem callous. But it still took some time for the Bug, as they call the rescue vehicle, to get to our location.

  The Bug is amazing. It is tall—three times the height of an average human—but relatively thin. Its center is a pod with clear openings all around. The operator is completely visible.

  Its sleekness reminds me of a single ship—at least in the pod part. But the sleekness ends with the pod. The rest of the Bug is all mechanical legs, with many joints, “like spider legs,” Bridge says, marveling again.

  I take his word for it. I’ve never seen a spider.

  The pod has legs on all sides. I count twenty, but I’m not certain because of the way they bend and hang and change. The Bug smells hot, and it groans as it moves, as if each bend in the legs needs lubrication.

  One of the operators—a man whose name I didn’t catch—tells me that sound is normal. It enables people inside caves and near the Bug to know when the Bug is co
ming. The sound also informs people to stay out of the way.

  It walks across the surface to get here, picking its way over the rubble with a delicacy that belies its size. As it comes, I talk to the guides. Or rather, Bridge does and I listen. The guides still have trouble seeing a woman as the leader of our small group—although they seem to be afraid of Ilona now.

  I wonder what she has threatened them with.

  The guides say that the Bug fits only four people, including the operator. I have left eight below.

  “All right,” I say after it becomes clear that the Bug will have to make three trips below just to get my people out. “Kersting, Quinte, and Seager come out first. Roderick and Mikk come up last. You got that?”

  I say this last to the operator. He shakes his head—our names are difficult for him.

  Ilona sighs with exasperation and writes everything down on one of the passes we were given long ago. “You give that to them,” she says to the operator.

  He looks at Bridge, as if Bridge would contradict her.

  Bridge takes the paper and hands it to the operator. “You must give that to them,” he says, as if Ilona hasn’t spoken.

  She makes a sputtering noise. I put my hand on her arm. She glances at me, then rolls her eyes.

  I hope no one else saw that. Right now, we need the Vaycehnese and their expertise.

  The operator nods and gets into the Bug. He looks like an organic part of the machine, sitting in the very center, his hands on controls that look like miniature versions of the legs.

  It’s rare that I see a vehicle I cannot drive, but the Bug is one. I have no idea how he controls the legs, given that they each have such individual movement. He walks it over to the opening that I scrambled out of not long ago.

  Then the Bug spreads its legs over the opening, using ten of them to surround the oval. The pod centers, then sinks inside. Other legs move inside with the pod, gripping the walls—or so one of the guides tells Bridge— while the ten legs remain on top for what seems like a very long time.

  One by one, the legs disappear. I hurry toward the edge, but someone grabs my arm.

  It’s one of the guides. He frowns at me. “You cannot go there.”

  “I want to watch,” I say.

  “It will take no time. You could get hurt.”

  I shake him off and hurry to the edge. I can see the ends of three legs, disappearing along the slope.

  If the Bug is already hard to see, then it’s near the bottom. The guide is right. I could get hurt if I remain here. I hurry back to my people.

  My heart is pounding. My fatigue is in the background, a steady thrum, but it has receded. The water and that little bit of food have helped.

  Maybe I’m acclimatizing to the heat.

  Or maybe I’m just ignoring it all because of the emergency.

  Less than five minutes later, the Bug returns to the surface, coming up the way it went down. Leg after leg pops out of the hole, gripping the edge. Then the pod comes up, followed by the other legs.

  This time, the Bug does not disengage itself from the opening. Instead, it leans the pod over one side and touches the pod to the ground. A door opens, and Seager steps out. She looks bewildered. She puts a hand over her face, shielding her eyes from the bright light. She is covered in blackness.

  She stumbles as she steps away from the pod. Ilona heads over with water and food as Quinte comes out, then Kersting, who raises both of his arms over his head in triumph.

  The Bug doesn’t wait. As the three of them step away from the pod, the door closes.

  Then the Bug centers itself over the hole again, and repeats the entire procedure.

  I let out a small sigh of relief. My people are going to get out. I’m not going to lose any team members today.

  And considering how careless I’ve been with this underground work, that’s damn close to miraculous.

  * * * *

  THIRTY-ONE

  W

  e travel back to the hotel in one of the undamaged hovercarts. I finally understand the practicality of these vehicles. Their relative thinness allows them to go around debris fields—and there are several debris fields throughout this part of Vaycehn. The hovercart’s pilot is very conscious of his passengers, never tilting the vehicle far enough to make us uncomfortable, but he still manages to maneuver around some dangerous areas.

  Besides the pilot, there are only three of us in this vehicle. Bridge, Ilona, and I remained behind after the rest of the team went back to the hotel. Everyone got out of the cavern, but looking ragged. Even Mikk and Roderick, so seemingly indestructible below, looked almost ruined by the experience.

  The tension, the heat, the physical labor had exhausted them like it exhausted me.

  But my work wasn’t done. I needed to let the guides know we were heading back into the cavern as soon as we could.

  Of course, they didn’t want us to. It quickly became clear that we would need permission from the city again, and I couldn’t tell them why. I hadn’t told Bridge or Ilona, either, when they started the negotiations with the guides. I didn’t want the news of the ship to leak to the Vaycehnese.

  Bridge managed to convince the Bug operator that clearing the debris and inspecting the caverns for more damage was a priority. He did that not with authority and argument but with money.

  This trip is going to cost us a lot more than expected. But it’ll be worthwhile—if the ship remains long enough for us to investigate it.

  The guides don’t want us to go below for more than two weeks. That’s now long groundquakes continue after the first large one. But Bridge managed to get the guides to admit that such aftershocks only happened after a pure groundquake—one that occurred without an accompanying death hole.

  The death hole quakes were usually one-time things.

  Usually.

  I know it will take a lot of argument and probably a handful of bribes to get us below. Bridge and Ilona are going to handle that, and I have told them to use their discretion.

  We need to go below again, and the Vaycehnese shouldn’t stop us.

  However, a repeat of today’s underground disaster could.

  I’m not sure how many of the Six will be willing to go below again, and I’m not sure how to convince them.

  I’m going to need to talk to the geologists and archeologists, and I’ve told Ilona I’ll need some Vaycehnese expert, someone who’ll help us prepare for disasters underground. At least, prepare better than we have been.

  As we head back to the hotel, the damage from the quake becomes clear. Roads have collapsed. Some buildings have lost entire sides, while others remain standing undamaged.

  The cloud of dust in the distance is, according to the hovercart’s pilot, from the death hole itself. It blew outward, sending debris a kilometer into the air. Some of that debris will float around for days.

  I want someone from our team to figure out exactly where that death hole is in relationship to the underground room we’ve found. I want to know when the death hole appeared and whether or not it really was tied to the ship. I want a lot of things, and I’m too tired to ask for them.

  We’ll need to have a meeting when we get back—I have to brief our people—but I’m not sure a meeting will be the most productive thing to do first.

  First, we’ll need sleep.

  My brain is mush. I’m so tired I’m shaking. I realize now how close we came to a complete disaster.

  And yet, part of me doesn’t mind.

  An intact working Dignity Vessel arrived in front of us. Intact. Working. It seems like a dream now, and I’m worried that when we get back the ship will be gone again.

  We have readings from it, though. Readings and recordings, and I actually touched it.

  I touched it. A living, breathing part of history. I’m still amazed.

  The hovercart stops outside the hotel. We climb out—or rather, Bridge and Ilona climb out. I try, stagger, and nearly fall. Bridge catches me. His gaze meets mine.


  He looks terrified.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” he asks me softly.

  “Nothing sleep won’t cure,” I say.

  But sleep is still a long way off. Ilona talks to the hovercart pilot, probably telling him when to return, something I would normally do. But I’m barely able to walk.