I can hear Squishy’s voice warning against the gids, and for once, I care. I want to survive this trip into the room, and the next, and the next. I want to enjoy every minute of this discovery.
And I want the discovery to be there.
That’s what really has my heart racing: I’m afraid the Dignity Vessel is gone.
I put my hand on the door itself, ready to push. First, though, I turn to the Six.
“Be prepared for anything,” I say, and then I try the door.
It opens easily. It’s not locked or barricaded.
I step into the room, and the particles swirl around me. I can’t help myself—I immediately look at that landing pad.
The Dignity Vessel is still there.
I let out a small breath. Relief.
I step all the way inside, cautiously. I look around.
To my quick gaze, nothing looks different. The Dignity Vessel sits on the pad, the screens above the equipment show the inside of the room and nothing else, and the rest of the equipment looks like it has been off for a very long time.
Now mingled with the relief is just a bit of disappointment. I half hoped someone would be exploring or using the room. I was ready to have a difficult conversation with one of the people who had arrived on the Dignity Vessel.
But if no one has emerged in forty-eight hours, then I’m more inclined to think the ship is empty, drawn by something we did, some button we pressed, something we activated.
After all, we have found seven half-ruined Dignity Vessels throughout the sector. We have no idea if anything is wrong with this one. For all we know, the interior may be partially destroyed, the controls gone, some part of the vessel that we can’t yet see open to space.
DeVries stops beside me. Rea walks just a little ahead, as if he can’t believe that the Vessel is still there. I can feel Quinte behind me, and I know without looking that Al-Nasir is behind her. Seager is on my other side. The only person I seem to have lost track of is Kersting.
I turn slightly. He has wandered in the opposite direction from me, head tilted back, looking up at the Dignity Vessel.
I sense the awe in his movements, and I smile.
I feel it, too.
“It’s still here,” I say, stating the obvious. But someone has to. I have to let the relief I’m feeling become part of the group’s emotion.
“I didn’t think it would be,” Rea says.
“Me, either,” Seager says.
We all stop. We have an agreed-upon plan for this trip, one of two that we made. We agreed that if the Dignity Vessel was here we would proceed with caution. DeVries, Rea, and I would search for a way into the vessel. Kersting and Seager would go to the first section of equipment and take readings off of it, recording as much as they could so that our linguists and scientists ran figure out what’s going on here. Most of what we got the last time was distorted by our own movements.
Quinte and Al-Nasir will explore the area near the door, to make sure that there are no hidden ways to lock us in or activate something that we don’t want to activate.
Their instructions specifically warn them not to touch anything.
They were both happy with both parts of the instruction: the fact that they’d be looking and not touching, and the fact that they would be closest to the door in case something went wrong.
I get the area near the door. DeVries goes toward the back where the ship’s wings stretch out. Rea is going to walk beneath the curved front of the ship—or what I think of as the front—and see if there is a hatch anywhere. On half of the Dignity Vessels we’ve found—or I should say, on the half we’ve round with an intact front—we’ve found hatches.
That was one of my first clues that not all Dignity Vessels are exactly alike. They were altered, either by time or convention or need or all three.
We move cautiously, as if we are diving. That was my instruction up top, and I plan to live up to it down here, despite my own excitement. We’re also running on a time limit: six hours, which might feel extra long, considering now much oxygen we’re using.
We’re all nervous and excited. The causes may be different—I think Al-Nasir is frightened enough for all of us—but the result is the same.
If we were actually in space, I’d worry about our oxygen use rate. I’m less worried about it here.
We’re taking more readings from the air and the particles. We can breathe here if we need to. It’s not the oxygen that’s the problem; it’s those particles. And with the groundquake, the rescue, and all of the things that followed, our own team of scientists hasn’t had a chance to adequately test anything we brought back from our last trip.
We’re proceeding exactly the same way in this one as we did the last time, because we have no new information.
I move slowly across the floor, stopping after each step and looking around, just like I would on a dive. The others do as well. It looks like we’re doing a particularly well-timed ballet, but we need to be cautious.
Part of me feels as if something has changed here, but I have no idea what that would be. And I can’t really trust my feelings at the moment. They might be based on excitement or expectations or sheer nerves, nerves I’m not entirely admitting.
Still, I have a sense that we’re being watched.
I force myself to concentrate on the ship as I walk toward it. The laser sears are as I remember them; the door is in the same place, and it is closed.
But there is a difference.
A vast difference.
One that makes my breath catch.
The exterior of the ship is different. The color is richer. The score marks look deeper, more damaging. The outline of the door is clearer.
And the ship itself glistens as if it’s waiting for us.
As if it’s waiting for me.
* * * *
FORTY-FOUR
T
hey’re back.” Anita Tren sounded excited. She blew up the real-time image of the exterior of the Ivoire without Coop’s permission. Suddenly all of the screens on the bridge were filled with images of the abandoned sector base.
Coop shifted in his command chair, turning toward the full wall screen on the left side of the bridge. That screen showed the door leading into the sector base.
The door was easing open.
He almost corrected Anita, but didn’t. His breath had caught, and he felt just a little redeemed. He had thought the outsiders would return.
And now they had.
This time there were seven, not five.
“Compare, would you?” he said to Dix. “I want to know if any of those people are the same ones who were here forty-eight hours ago.”
Dix didn’t answer. He had been unusually quiet since getting the news about the sector base. He seemed shrunken in on himself, exhausted, as if he couldn’t sleep.
Coop had seen him like this before, and he knew that Dix, despite his emotional upset, would get the job done.
Coop’s eyes already told him that the person who had come in the door first was the woman he had noticed earlier. The woman who had put her glove against the ship, as if it were a miracle, something she had never, ever expected.
He couldn’t tell, however, if the others were people who had come in before.
“Shouldn’t we go talk to them?” Perkins asked.
She stood near the screens, her hands clasped behind her back, unknowingly mimicking the posture that Coop had every single time he stared at the same images in the captain’s suite.
Only he was trying to quell his own emotions, to keep his mind even, focused, and calm.
Perkins, so far as he could tell, was excited. She wanted to throw herself into the work.
“Not yet,” Coop said to Perkins. “We don’t want to startle them.”
She turned and gave him a winning smile. “C’mon, Captain,” she said in a wheedling tone. “They know we’re here. How else would the ship have come in?”
“The anacapa,” Dix said, his tone a
s dismal as his posture. “Working automatically.”
Perkins frowned at him. “They’re outsiders. How would they know that?”
“How do they know anything?” Yash asked. She was going over the data in front of her as well. “They’re explorers in this place. That’s clear from the way they move. We have no idea how they manage or what they do.”
“Which is why we’re not going through that door until we’re ready,” Coop said. “We don’t want to surprise them. For all we know, they’ve never seen a spaceship before.”
“I’d wager you’re right,” Yash said. “I can’t imagine how those environmental suits would survive in space. They probably have just started developing their own space program. And those suits aren’t going to take them very far.”
“That we can tell,” Perkins said. “Cultures always mix old and new. Sometimes people wear things that are ceremonial.”
“With equipment?” Yash said. “I don’t think so.”
Coop smiled. Yash wouldn’t. She always wanted the latest, best, most improved. That was one of the reasons he had hired her in the first place, because she tinkered and improved everything around her.
The seven outsiders clustered in a group, and the woman gestured. He was right; she was the one in charge.
“Five are the same, two new, just like it looks,” Dix said without inflection.
“Do you think they’re always going to be coming in forty-eight-hour intervals?” Anita asked.
“Doubtful,” Coop said. “If I had to guess—and it would just be a guess—the two new are arbiters of some kind, or people with a particular expertise.”
Perkins shifted, as if she couldn’t contain the energy she felt. “I could go ask.”
“And get attacked?” Yash asked. “They’re wearing knives.”
“Knives, I know,” Perkins said. “How old-fashioned is that?”
“Actually,” Dix said, “only one of them is wearing a knife, and it seems more like an all-purpose tool than a weapon.”
“The woman in charge,” Coop said.
Dix nodded. “She’s also carrying something that looks like a laser pistol. Her hand hovered near it as she came in the door. She was expecting an attack.”
“Or worrying about one,” Coop said more to himself than the others.
“They shouldn’t see anything different,” Yash said. “We made sure of that.”
“I think we should go out there,” Perkins said. “If they’re already expecting us—”
“To attack them,” Coop said. “They thought we might attack them. Coming out the door is not the best idea at the moment.”
Although he wanted to go out there himself, quiz them, and figure out if all of the readings his team had taken were right. He wanted to find out what was going on, what had happened to Venice City, if there were still members of the Fleet (or descendents of it) on Wyr.
Perkins sighed, but said no more. She understood she’d been overruled.
The outsiders split into three teams, two people staying by the door, two going to the equipment, and three coming to the ship itself.
“I hope they don’t touch anything they shouldn’t,” Anita said.
“They can’t tamper with much,” Yash said. “Most of the equipment is in shut-down mode.”
“Who knows what time has done to corrode it?” Dix said, without looking up.
“I guess we’ll find out,” Coop said, as he settled in to watch.
* * * *
FORTY-FIVE
T
he hours pass quickly and we haven’t found anything. Or at least, we haven’t found anything we understand.
We’ve gotten lots of information, recorded many things, explored many parts of the room and a little bit of the exterior of the ship. We even found a name and a vessel number on the Dignity Vessel. I can’t read the name because it’s in Old Earth Standard—or at least, I think that might be standard. It’s an ancient Earth language, anyway, and my Old Earth Standard is mostly limited to helpful words like “danger” and “keep out.”
I’ve given up on the door. I found the latch quickly enough—it is exactly where latches always are on Dignity Vessel doors—but I can’t open it. I’ve pressed it, moved it, changed it, and it still won’t budge. Either the door is locked from the inside—which is something I’ve never seen in a Dignity Vessel—or it keeps relatching every time I think I’ve opened it.
Al-Nasir and Quinte have found some overrides for the door leading to the corridor. They’ve also found a way to turn on the interior lights—all without touching a thing.
The interior lights came on after Quinte ran her hand over a part of the wall nearest the door.
We all blinked in the brightness and then got back to work. Or at least I did. DeVries and Rea and Al-Nasir and Quinte all stared as if they hadn’t seen the place before.
And when I finally gave up on the latch, I stared, too.
It’s not exactly what I thought it was. When the room had been shrouded in darkness, it had the feeling of a place that went on forever, of a room that led to other rooms, which led to even more rooms, which then became a compound.
Now that the lights are on full, I realize that the room is really one gigantic repair shop. There are several platforms marked “danger” in Old Earth Standard, and unlike the one I’m standing on, those are all empty. There are other equipment consoles built into the walls around each platform, and those consoles show nothing on their screens.
I wonder idly what would happen if we touch them. Would we get another Dignity Vessel?
I’d try, except that I want to find out more about this Dignity Vessel first, and then there’s the problem of the death hole.
This morning before we left, Gregory informed me that the new death hole—the one we think the Dignity Vessel caused (and by extension, we probably caused)—is the largest in Vaycehn’s recorded history.
I don’t want to do that again. I didn’t want to do it before.
So I’ve warned my people away from the other consoles, at least for the time being. Not that they were hurrying over there. We’re swamped with the consoles we have.
I’m proud of Kersting and Seager. They’re going over the consoles we have touched millimeter by millimeter, making sure they miss nothing. I can hear their conversation in my comm—”You take that.” “Got it.” “I’m finishing this.” “Good.”—and it feels like an accompaniment to the constant strumming of stealth tech.
I wish my equipment measured the sound of stealth tech, because it seems to me that the sound has changed since the last time we were here. It was louder just before the ship came in, and slightly different once the ship arrived. Now the sound has less treble and more bass. Even the treble has a bit of vibrato in it that wasn’t there before.
It’s distracting, and the conversation between Kersting and Seager takes my mind off of it.
I moved away from the door two hours ago and walked under the ship, booking for the hatches that I know are there. I found one, welded closed (or, at least, it looked like it was welded), and another that’s barely within my reach.
As I stand on tiptoe to inspect the top part of the hatch, I brace one hand against the ship itself. I run my hand across the top of the hatch and feel nothing. The hatch should have a latch in the very center, if it follows the same design as the other Dignity Vessels I’ve encountered, but I save the center for last.
I’m not used to standing on my toes for prolonged periods of time and, if truth be told, my legs are still incredibly sore. So I drop down to the flat of my feet and look at the rest of the room.
I’m tempted to go down there and see if there are ladders or stepping stools or even chairs, something that will allow me to stand above that hatch opening.
But I can’t touch anything down there, not yet, and I’m not going to. Every time I think of walking outside of this small area, I force myself to remember that death hole.
The far end of the room curves. Ther
e isn’t a platform that I can see, but there are even more consoles and, it looks like, places to hang smaller pieces of equipment. I have a hunch there are doors down there that lead to storage or maybe a place to stay.
I can’t imagine employees coming down here through those corridors every day, not unless there were hovercarts back when this place was in full use.
Something else for my historians to research. But after my encounter with Paplas yesterday, I’m beginning to understand the difficulty.
City of Ruins - [Diving Universe 02] Page 25
