City of Ruins - [Diving Universe 02]

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “Eventually,” Carmak says.

  “How about soon?” I ask. “We don’t want them to leave before we talk to them about their ship.”

  And stealth tech, and the room, and the death holes. I have so many questions. The problem is that even if we do have a grasp of the language, it’s the common parts of the language we share. The technical parts—how the machines work, what the black coating is—we might not be able to communicate about for a very long time.

  “If you don’t mind,” Carmak says, “I’d like to work with Fahd. He’s got a facility for this language, and he might move quicker than everyone else.”

  Meaning me.

  “Simultaneous translation is not easy,” I say.

  “We might be able to develop a program for that,” Bridge says. He’s been looking at the language, too. “That’ll take a few weeks at best, but it might help.”

  “All right,” I say. “Fahd, when you’re not with us in that room, you’ll go with Dana, and the two of you will do your best to understand the language.”

  “What about the rest of us?” Stone says. “We have language training.”

  “It’s the spoken language I care about, Lucretia,” I say. “You can continue to work on the written language. If nothing else, we’ll write them notes. But it would be better if we can actually talk to them.”

  She purses her lips, but it’s clear she understands me.

  “Were you able to understand what they said today?” I ask Carmak.

  “I think Fahd is right,” Carmak says. “They want to meet tomorrow.”

  “Any reason they broke off the discussion today?” I ask. I’ve been thinking about it, and I haven’t come up with a reason.

  “It sounded to me like they were confused,” Carmak says. “They kept asking your name.”

  I feel my cheeks heat. “We didn’t use my name.”

  “That’s the point, and the problem. If they know the word ‘Boss,’ then they’re not sure if the questions were asked and answered right. I think it’s probably best if Fahd is going to deal with them on a personal level. Unless you’re willing to use your real name . . .”

  Carmak let her voice fade down, but I can hear the question in it. I don’t tell people my name, not because I’ve disavowed it, but because it doesn’t have much meaning for me. My parents gave me that name. More specifically, my father gave it to me. Before, I only told a select group of people my name. Now, I don’t bother.

  “All right,” I say. “I’ll do my best not to confuse things.”

  “I think you should keep getting information from all the equipment,” Stone says to me.

  “I think you’re right,” I say. “Let’s hope they don’t take offense at that.”

  “You’ll still bring your weapons in, right?” Bernadette Ivy asks. She opted not to return to the Business when no one else decided to go, but she still approaches everything around here with something akin to terror.

  “We will,” I say, “but I don’t think the laser pistols will mean much. We saw a lot of people this afternoon, and to my eye, they all looked military. Which means that there are a lot more people on board that ship. We were outnumbered today in that room. We might be outnumbered in actuality by hundreds.”

  Everyone stares at me, looking appalled. The Six, in particular, have stricken looks on their faces.

  “What if they decide to take us hostage?” Quinte asks.

  “We can’t come in and rescue you,” Roderick says. He looks worried.

  “If they take us, they take us,” I say. I have to be honest about this. “We don’t have the numbers to fight back. The rest of you will have to monitor us. If we don’t come out of that room within the scheduled time, then you wait a few days. If you still haven’t heard from us, then you follow the emergency evacuation plan.”

  Stone and Mikk look at each other. If something happens to me, there will be a little battle for control of this group.

  The rest of the group looks alarmed. I’m going to quell this current panic now.

  “I don’t think we have a lot to worry about on that front,” I say. “They could have taken us any time in the previous two missions. Instead, they came out and tried to initiate a dialogue. They’re as curious about us as we are about them.”

  “I doubt that,” Kersting says softly.

  “If they’re anything like the Dignity Vessels of legend,” I say, “they get to know people before they make decisions about them. They’re trying to get to know us now. We’re not going to make any threatening moves. I suspect we’ll be fine.”

  No one speaks for a moment. Then DeVries looks at me.

  “Don’t you think something is off here?” he asks softly.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “I mean, we’ve always heard about a fleet, but we’ve only found individual ships, and they’ve been old and ruined. Now we have an intact one. Do we even know this is the original crew? Or maybe these people are another group who have hijacked that ship, and don’t know how to work it.”

  A chill runs down my back. I’ve been so excited to see a working Dignity Vessel that such a thought has never crossed my mind. And I’m usually enough of a pessimist to see problems like that.

  “It’s a possibility,” I say. “But they can clearly operate in a stealth-tech field. So they have the genetic marker, at the very least.”

  “Which means what, exactly?” Mikk asks. “Maybe they’re like your father, ruthless in picking their crew members, letting the ones without the marker die.”

  “Maybe,” I say, “but I keep coming back to their military precision. Thieves usually don’t have that.”

  “Neither do wreck divers,” says Tamaz with a grin.

  He doesn’t know how accurate he is. I felt like a bumbling fool when I saw the care the ship’s crew used as they came down the stairs.

  “We’ll figure this all out,” I say. “It’ll just take time.”

  ‘“Time,”‘ DeVries repeats, as if he didn’t want to hear that.

  “Let’s just hope,” I say, trying to keep the group calm, “that the crew of that vessel is as patient as we are.”

  “Who says we’re patient?” Kersting asks, and everyone laughs.

  I laugh, too, but I really don’t find the comment funny. I’m not feeling patient. I’m not feeling patient at all.

  * * * *

  CITY OF RUINS

  * * * *

  FIFTY-FOUR

  I

  t took Perkins nearly two weeks to figure out the outsiders’ language with any kind of precision. During that time, the engineers repaired the anacapa and most of the weapons systems. Other repairs remained, but none to the major systems. Coop sifted through much of the information pulled from the repair room’s equipment, but he didn’t come up with any more information than his team was finding.

  He repeatedly had communications contact Venice City, but didn’t get any response. He mapped the underground caverns around the repair room a second time. The entire complex was much bigger than it had been the month before.

  And as the remaining sensors came back online, he had his team see what they could find on the surface.

  There was a city in the narrow valley, just like there had been for decades. But the city was no longer in the same place. Instead, it was scattered along the mountainside, far away from the city center that Coop had visited several times.

  All of these pieces of information didn’t add up to anything coherent, not yet, which made talking to the outsiders all the more imperative.

  The number of outsiders never changed, and although Perkins asked the woman what their group was called, she never got an answer she understood.

  Perkins was understanding more and more, however, partly because of the outsiders themselves. After a few days, the man showed an increasing ability to speak Perkins’s language. It took Perkins another day or two to understand him because the man mangled every single word he tried to say. It was almost as
if he was familiar with the language in its written form, but hadn’t ever spoken it.

  At least, that was Perkins’s hypothesis. Coop wasn’t so certain. If the outsiders could read Standard, then how come they hadn’t heeded the warnings written all over the floor in the repair room? How come they seemed surprised when the ship nearly crushed one of them?

  Still, Coop wasn’t the linguist, and he had to rely on Perkins’s expertise to figure out what was going on. In less than two weeks, Perkins decided that the language the outsiders spoke was a form of Standard, but so changed by time and distance, as well as influence from other cultures, as to be practically unrecognizable.

  The fact that the man could speak her language, though, didn’t bode well, as she told Coop in one of their briefings.

  “Sir, I think all of this means that we speak an old and possibly forgotten form of their language. One that is no longer active, but lives only in archives.”

  He felt a chill run through him. “How long does it take for a language to change like that?”

  She shrugged. “There are instances of that happening within a few hundred years of no contact.”

  “But?” he asked.

  “But generally, it happens over many centuries. Five, six, seven hundred years or more.”

  He stared at her. It was within the realm of possibility. They had gotten the ship to talk with the equipment in the repair room, but hadn’t gleaned any more information about the time factor. Some of the scientific tests had come back that the equipment itself had aged several hundred years, but, as the scientists said, some of that could have been due to the proximity of a working (and possibly malfunctioning) anacapa drive.

  “They can’t be from the future of Venice City,” he said. “Their suits aren’t as evolved as ours.”

  She shrugged. “They’re from our future somewhere. Somewhere they acquired our language. Then they lost touch with us, and the language changed, as languages do.”

  “It’s time for me to talk to them,” he said. “Can you clearly translate for us?”

  “If we do it in the Ivoire,” she said. “I need the computer and our linguistic team to back me up.”

  He thought about that for a moment. He had always envisioned the meeting to take place inside the repair room. He hadn’t wanted the outsiders in his ship.

  But he understood Perkins’s point. And he needed the information now more than he needed to protect the ship’s secrets.

  Not that it had a lot of secrets from the outsiders. They had access to similar equipment in the repair room, and they clearly hadn’t understood that.

  “All right,” Coop said. “Set up an appointment.”

  “Yes, sir,” Perkins said.

  “And I don’t want her whole team in here. Bring her and the man who speaks the language into the briefing room. You and I will talk to them.”

  “All right, sir,” Perkins said, and looked relieved. Everyone on the Ivoire was nervous. Everyone wanted answers because, as Dix told Coop, they were making up worst-case scenarios the longer this went on.

  Coop had been making up a few on his own.

  Initially those scenarios had involved being stranded in Sector Base V forever, but now that the Ivoire was getting repaired, he knew that wouldn’t happen. Now he just had to figure out where he would take his crew, and when.

  And for that, he needed to talk to the outsiders.

  * * * *

  FIFTY-FIVE

  W

  e have been struggling against the language barrier for more than two weeks. Every day seems the same; we go below, go into the room, and separate. Al-Nasir walks to a small table that the Dignity Vessel crew set up on the second day, sits down, and talks to their lieutenant, doing his best to understand her while she does her best to understand him.

  The rest of us scatter and look at the equipment. Only now, we each have someone from the Dignity Vessel shadowing us. They watch what we do, not that we’re doing much. We’re afraid to touch the consoles. We still don’t understand them.

  I’ve been going to the console that sits below the image of our science station. I think I’ve got some of these images figured out. The consoles are tied to particular Dignity Vessels, and the vessel that my people are currently working on is intact enough to send this image to the room.

  However, the ship isn’t working well enough to appear in the room itself. Or maybe I need to pull a lever or press a screen, which I have not done.

  I have spent a lot of time near that console, taking images back to our scientists and engineers on the surface. My people there are working as hard as we are below. They’re trying to decipher the secrets of the language and the secrets of the room, trying to figure out the parts of the conversations that Al-Nasir is having with the lieutenant that he can’t entirely understand. It’s slow going, but Carmak and Stone both assure me he’s picking up the language quickly.

  I have walked the length and breadth of the room, startled at its size. The minders have opened the doors in the back for me, and I am stunned by their emptiness. A gigantic room with shelves and storage. Suites of rooms behind another door that might have been quarters or a living space for the ship’s crews. And a door that opens onto what seems like nothing, but looked, after closer investigation, like a blocked tunnel.

  I am intrigued and frustrated. I want to learn more, but everything I see raises more questions.

  My team on the surface feels the same way. They have finally been allowed to visit the death hole. Stone has asked for permission to explore it, but so far the Vaycehnese government has refused her. She has walked around the edges, which, she tells me, have been smoothed by the same blackness we see below.

  The guides have been asking questions about our work, wanting to know what we’re doing so deep in the corridors. I simply say, “Exploring,” and don’t explain any more.

  Ilona has asked for an extended stay, saying that we’ve discovered a few things that might prevent death holes. She has told the Vaycehnese government that the death holes and the dangerous parts of the caves might be caused by the same thing. She has also told them we are searching for a solution to their problems.

  So far, they haven’t asked much, but that worries me. I hate having governments watch everything we do.

  I am standing in front of what I now think of as my console, staring at the screen, when a hand touches my shoulder.

  I turn, already protesting that I haven’t touched anything.

  Al-Nasir is behind me.

  “They have a request,” he says. “And I think you need to deal with it.”

  I don’t even try to hide my surprise. I haven’t talked with their lieutenant since the first day. I follow Al-Nasir across the floor, heading toward that little table.

  Someone has brought out a third chair.

  The lieutenant stands when she sees me. She’s no longer wearing that black uniform, which I gather was something official. She wears a white shirt and black pants, along with a loose jacket that has writing on it that I can’t read. I suspect this is a more informal uniform, but I don’t really know.

  She’s also younger than I would expect. I’ve only watched from a distance, since there is no way I can oversee this language transfer.

  She smiles at me, and beckons toward the chair.

  I put my hand on the side, then wait. She understands. We sit together.

  Al-Nasir sits as well.

  I wait for her to speak.

  She says, “Boss—?” then looks at Al-Nasir for confirmation.

  He nods.

  She says in good, if accented, Standard, “My captain would like to meet you.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “He would like it one leader to another,” she says.

  “Okay,” I say, not quite sure what she wants.

  “He would like you and Fahd to come on board ...” and then she says a word I do not understand. “The meeting would be private.”

  “On board the ship?�
�� I ask.

  She nods.

  “I haven’t figured out that word yet,” Al-Nasir says to me softly, even though we both know the lieutenant can hear. “I think it’s the name of the ship.”

  My heart is pounding. I would love to go on board that ship. “My team will come with me, of course.”

  She shakes her head. We’re communicating a lot better than I would have expected two weeks ago.