The Bug carefully lifts the rocks off the front end. Each rock seems larger than the last.
I finally understand why the cart is bent at an upward angle. The rocks almost flattened the very front part of the hovercart. Had anyone been standing there, they would have been crushed.
I shudder. My people faced this, without me. We were somehow protected in that room.
I would rather die in the vastness of space, slowly freezing to death, unable to breathe as my environmental suit shuts down (or gets breached) than I would being crushed by a load of rocks in an underground cave.
No wonder some of my people looked at me with great hesitation when I said we needed to get back down here quickly. They have vivid imaginations. They know that they could die like this, that the ground around us is horribly unstable, and that it’s worse inside these caves.
They know it and they don’t want to come back down.
Is it fair to ask my team to come with me?
I’m not sure on that.
Fortunately I have some time to think about it. Although I have less time than I originally thought.
Paplas finishes digging out the corridors with surprising speed. When he’s done, he says nothing to us. He does pull off his ear protectors. Then he rapidly rotates the pod 120 degrees, so that we’re now facing the way that we came into the corridor.
Then he marches the Bug forward, as if we’re late to an appointment.
Bridge clutches his ear protectors, uncertain whether or not to remove them. I pull mine off.
Suddenly, noise fills the little pod. The grinding gears, the thudding from the massive feet, a humming sound, probably caused by our proximity to the stealth tech—something I had forgotten to warn Paplas about.
My heart rate surges, and for a moment, I feel guilty. I have been so absorbed in the process that I have forgotten the real danger.
But Paplas has that map, and the area just beyond that last rock fall is marked in black. I finally realize what the map is. It is a map of the areas inside the caves where people have died mysteriously.
Bridge leans forward. “Can we take off our ear protectors?” he says, just a little too loudly.
“Why not?” Paplas says, as if the very question is ridiculous.
Bridge whips his off and juts them forward, as if he expects Paplas to take them from him.
“Hang onto them,” Paplas says, his hands busy with the controls. The Bug hasn’t moved this fast since we got below ground. In fact, I didn’t know it could move this fast.
Bridge hangs the ear protectors over his right knee. Then he rubs his ears with the flat of his hands, an expression of distaste on his face. I understand what he’s done; my ears feel a bit slimy as well. But I’ll wait to wash them when we get back to the hotel.
Apparently Bridge can’t wait.
I lean into him and say as softly as I can, “Ask what happens to the pulverized rock.”
Paplas tilts his head. He’s heard me. But stubborn creature that he is, he doesn’t answer me. He waits until Bridge repeats the question.
“The dust vanishes,” Paplas says. “The rocks would eventually vanish too if we just left them there. The piles were probably smaller this morning than they were last night.”
Now Bridge is interested. He has forgotten the slimy feeling of his ears. The fingers of his right hand close around the ear protectors—probably unconsciously—as he leans forward just a bit.
“How does that work?” he asks.
“No one knows,” Paplas says. “It is as mysterious as the black walls. Many of our scientists believe that the pulverized rock becomes fuel for the black coating, but they do not know where the coating comes from, or where the rock gets stored since it is rarely used immediately.”
“So rock falls always go away?” Bridge asks.
“If we wait long enough,” Paplas says. “The corridors are always open.”
Bridge and I exchange glances.
“So you just developed this machine to hurry the process along?” Bridge asks.
“We developed the machine for above ground,” Paplas says. “And to rescue people trapped below mountains of rubble. Sometimes you cannot wait.”
There’s a bit of judgment in his tone, as if we should have thought of that. I remember his caution on the hovercart. I wonder if anyone told him it was there. If not, he was probably angry when he came upon it, thinking that there might be dead people inside, people he could have saved.
I keep my word, however. I remain silent.
“Have you ever wondered what created these caves?” Bridge asks. “Have you ever wondered what keeps them running?”
“No,” Paplas says so quickly and so curtly that it’s clear he’s lying. “I have never thought of it at all.”
* * * *
FORTY
W
e return to the hotel, hot, tired, and a little confused. My mind is full of shattered rocks, open corridors, and floors that absorb one material, but not others.
Bridge doesn’t say much, either, except to rub his ears. He veers off the moment we get inside the cool lobby and heads to his room, determined to shower. He’s mentioned that intent twice now, and I have no doubt he’s thought of it even more.
I stop at the desk and set up a catered dinner spread for the evening. Then I leave a message for the rest of my team, just to make sure they know the time as well as the place.
I still have my lunch. We never had time to eat it, not that it’s much past lunchtime anyway. I carry it upstairs to my room, where I sink into the privacy, and my own exhaustion.
I’m not used to being glassy-eyed, to have something as simple as sitting and watching tire me out. Usually I can go for days while others cannot. But my muscles ache, my eyes are tired, and I’m ragged from the heat.
The meal doesn’t refresh me, so I lie down on the bed—and immediately slip into sleep.
I dream . . .
I’m back at the Room of Lost Souls. It’s vast and empty, an abandoned space station or something, left by the ancients or a community unknown. I am aware enough in this dream to know this is not the Room of Lost Souls of my childhood, nor is it the recurring nightmare I’ve had all my life.
In that nightmare, I am still a child. I accompany my mother, holding her hand, as we go into the room. We see lights, hear music, and—
I wrench my mind from that. I am standing in one of my skips, my hands clasped behind my back. My team refuses to let me pilot the skip, refuses to let me dive the Room, because they know my emotional history with it.
My father is with us, and curiously, he is in the skip. He shouldn’t be. I have banned him from the missions.
I turn to him and see him as I last saw him, standing before a bottle of working stealth tech, a bottle he has created. He is conquering the technology, and he has done so by betraying me.
He has twice sent me into the Room, twice testing to see if I have the genetic marker that allows me to survive in stealth tech. If I do not have it, I will die as hideously as my mother, thinking I am alone, abandoned, as time leaches the oxygen from my environmental suit, as I struggle against a door I cannot open to get back to a world I can no longer reenter. I will die by degrees, but to those with the marker and those not inside stealth tech, it will seem as if I died in a moment. All that time passes for me, and none for them, and I cannot save myself.
I look at this man, this man who should have loved and protected me from the start, and I go to him, my fists clenched. I am not sure now who I am—the child he sent into that Room? The adult woman he tried to send in again?
“You wouldn’t have died,” he says. “You’ve done much more dangerous things on your own.”
He’s holding that bottle of stealth tech. It pulses in his hand.
I want to snatch it from him.
“Do you know what the difference is?” I ask. “The difference with those dangerous things?”
My father shakes his head. He actually looks intereste
d.
“The difference is that I chose to take those risks,” I say. “I didn’t choose this one.”
He opens his hands as if he’s going to hug me. The bottle of stealth tech is gone.
“You said someone is going to die on this mission.” He speaks softly, reminding me. “I heard you. You said it more than once.”
My breath catches. My heart pounds. My fists are so tightly clenched that my hands hurt.
“I always tell my teams that,” I say. “It makes them vigilant.”
“But this time you believed it,” my father says.
“Yes,” I say. “Because someone always dies.”
I sit up. My heart is still pounding. I can barely breathe. My fists are clenched.
But I’m in a bed in a hotel in Vaycehn, after having gone into a group of caves in which none of my team has died.
No one died. Not here.
Not yet.
I rub a hand over my face, then get out of bed. My legs are so sore that it feels as if they creak when they move. I wouldn’t be surprised if I heard that same grinding noise I heard from the Bug every time I move a limb.
I stagger to the bathroom before getting sick.
I haven’t told this team that someone could die. I haven’t said a word, like I usually do on diving missions. I have believed what other people told me. I believed that being on the ground was safe.
And I am wrong.
My God. Sometimes you become your parents without even realizing you’ve made the transition.
I get up, splash cold water on my face, and turn on the shower.
Tonight’s meeting is going to be different than I planned.
Tonight’s meeting might change everything.
* * * *
FORTY-ONE
C
oop stood in the center of the captain’s suite, hands clasped behind his back, studying the walls. He had the screens on. He was staring at images of foldspace.
The captains’ suites in all of the Fleet vessels were located in the same place and had the same basic structure. Five rooms, including private galley. The suite also had a full kitchen plus dining area that had doors that closed it off from the rest of the suite. The head chef used the full kitchen to prepare meals for the captain’s private guests whenever he chose to have a dinner party. He didn’t do that often, so that part of the suite rarely got used.
He’d learned to cook while in school and usually made his own meals in the private galley. One of those meals cooled on the table behind him. He didn’t feel like eating, but he knew he had to just so that he could keep up his strength.
The living area smelled of roast beef. The beef was not really beef; it was something that the chef had found on Ukhanda that approximated beef, but cooked properly, it tasted of beef, something Coop usually loved.
He had made a meal that he usually couldn’t ignore, and here he was ignoring it.
That showed, even to him, the level of his distress.
He sighed and made himself turn his back on the wall screens, if only for a moment. He was as shaken as his crew at this news-—which, he had admonished them, they couldn’t tell anyone else. Not yet.
Five hundred years in his own future, a thousand.
He sat at the table and listened to the chair squeak beneath him. He picked up his fork and stared at the beef. Potatoes—real potatoes, grown in the hydroponic garden on board the ship, along with three varieties of lettuce for his salad, and the carrots he had cooked with the roast. A small bowl of strawberry compote waited for him to finish the main course.
He twirled the fork. He had no appetite. This had happened to him before, when he knew he had to divorce Mae. As his mind had accepted the new reality, his stomach twisted in knots and refused sustenance, as well as sleep.
He’d been finishing his captain’s training at the time. His instructors figured out what was wrong and forced him to eat.
A captain of a flagship vessel in the Fleet couldn’t afford human weakness. He couldn’t afford to lose his appetite. He couldn’t afford to lose sleep.
He couldn’t afford to collapse.
Coop ate a bite of the beef. The gravy coating it had the proper amount of richness, just a hint of exotic spice from a community that the Ivoire had visited during the first year of his command.
The memory made him smile for just a moment, until another thought collided with it.
That community was gone. Changed. Different. Even if he went back (and he wouldn’t have; the Fleet never went back), he wouldn’t find the couple who had taught him how to grow that spice and helped him transplant the tiny seedlings into a pot to take with him to the hydroponic garden where, it turned out, the botanists had already taken some of the same plants.
He chewed, swallowed. Took another bite. Tried to swallow past the knot in his throat.
Nothing in those images of foldspace told him how the Ivoire had gotten here. For two weeks, he had looked at the unfamiliar stars, the strange ridges of light, the area of space that had defied matching a star map, and he had figured out nothing then.
He figured out nothing now.
Coop took another bite: potatoes this time. Carrots, roasted. Beef again. Chew. Swallow. Try not to think about the lump in the throat.
After a century or two of separation, he wouldn’t be able to use the math to catch the Fleet. He would have to use investigation, cunning, and research.
He and his team would have to estimate where the Fleet might have been, then use the anacapa to get there. And that first trip with the anacapa drive, after this one, would be scary enough. If they overshot, if they miscalculated, they would have to work their way backward.
And how would they know if they miscalculated?
They would have to ask. They would have to research. They would have to look on the nearby planets themselves, going into various communities. The ship would become one gigantic investigative team that searched for word of the Fleet.
Once they found word of it, they’d move forward on the trajectory, stopping often, asking again, searching for word of the Fleet, looking at timelines, listening to memories, figuring out when (if) his people had passed through.
He might spend the rest of his life searching for the Fleet.
He set the fork down and rubbed his eyes, then blinked just for a moment. Made himself swallow, breathe. He had to stay calm, not just for himself, but for his entire ship.
He stood and walked back to the screens. With one quick verbal command, he changed the image from foldspace to the abandoned sector base.
It was still empty. The equipment still looked abandoned. The occasional unbonded nanobit floated by.
In his lifetime six ships had disappeared from the Fleet, maybe forever.
In his father’s lifetime, ten.
In his grandfather’s, none at all.
It simply depended on events, on the uses of the anacapa.
Although in his grandfather’s lifetime, six ships had been destroyed by one form of disaster or another without once using the anacapa. Enemy fire, malfunctioning equipment. Coop’s grandfather spent half of his life going back and forth between sector bases as the Fleet got repaired and upgraded for the hundredth, maybe thousandth time in its existence.
From some people’s perspective, from the perspective of Dix’s chef, for example, the Ivoire would be lost. If, indeed, the information that Coop had was correct. He would rejoin the Fleet and there would be new commanders, new crews, new everything.
Except a new mission.
He sighed and stared at the empty base before him. The lighting was dim. The emptiness continued into the darkness as far as the eye could see.
When he had last left here, he’d had an imagined future, one that consisted of some kind of variation of the life he’d led, going from place to place with the Fleet, remaining in his place within the generations, with the people he knew.
An imagined future that he didn’t know-—and they didn’t know—was co
mpletely wrong. Because no matter what happened now, his future was not as he had planned it.
Unless he became very, very lucky, he would never again see anyone he knew, except for the crew of this ship. Everyone else would be gone by the time he caught the Fleet. If he never caught the Fleet—if his son or his son’s sons caught the Fleet (if he had children at all, now)—then he would spend his life chasing what amounted to a phantom.
City of Ruins - [Diving Universe 02] Page 23
