Kristine Rusch - City of Ruins

“C’mon, Boss,” Roderick says, “we’ve already seen that. In the Room. The way the station just kept getting bigger.”

“But that looked like it was falling out of the field,” Mikk says. Even though he gets impatient with scientific theory, he does remember it. Sometimes I think he’s too smart for the rest of us, which is why his patience with people who establish fundamentals before they get to the point is so short.

“Greg?” I ask. “Did it suddenly explode?”

“‘Explode’ is the wrong word,” he says. “Sometimes it would expand. It would be concentrated in one area, like air going through a tube.”

“Or a narrow field coming up through the earth,” says Stone.

Even though we’re not on the Earth, no one corrects her. We know what she meant.

I sigh. “This isn’t evidence, you know.”

“It’s another piece,” Ilona says.

It is that.

“Can you get more information from your friend?” I ask Lentz.

“I can try,” Lentz says. “I can ask him to lunch or something. But we have to be really informal. He can lose his job.”

“Hell, why don’t you just hire him, Boss?” Mikk says. “That’ll take care of the cloak-and-dagger stuff.”

“I’d like to know if he has something to add before I do,” I say.

“Besides, hiring him might cut off his access to these death holes,” Ilona says. “It’s becoming clearer and clearer that the Vaycehnese are protecting the reputation of their city, and they’re doing it at great cost.”

“Cities do that all the time,” Carmak says. “Governments lie. They don’t want the bad stuff to get out. That’s normal.”

“But sometimes it’s just there.” Cesar Voris, one of the historians, speaks up for the first time. He’s one of my new hires. Carmak recommended him because he’s an expert in this region of space. He specializes in ancient history, but he loves modern as well, and he spends his off time studying. I’ve never had another employee work quite that hard.

“What do you mean, ‘there’?” Carmak asks.

Voris shrugs. He’s a big man with a shock of white hair that makes his brown skin seem even darker than it is. His eyes are very black and very alert.

He looks directly at me. “You said to find out what we can about the death toll in the caves, so I did.”

“We couldn’t find anything,” Gregory says. “No one’ll talk.”

“That’s right,” Voris says. “But we’re interested in information. History, when you come down to it. So I went to the City Museum.”

“The director wouldn’t talk to me,” says Ilona.

Voris folds his hands together and waits until the others stop speaking.

“The City Museum of Vaycehn,” he says like the teacher he used to be, “is an amazing place. It has a great library, and so many fascinating exhibits, I doubt anyone could see them all in the space of a month.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Mikk says. “Don’t tease us with information and then not give it.”

“The thing is,” Voris says as if Mikk hasn’t spoken, “the exhibits cover the history of Vaycehn as accurately as possible. There is a quick viewing area that the tourists usually go to, and indeed are directed to, being told that the rest of the place will take most of their trip to see.”

Mikk sighs impatiently. I grab another spotted apple and turn it over in my hands.

“But if you go in with an agenda, you can see quite a bit. I decided my agenda was the caves. The longer I was there, the more I realized I needed to know about the way the city center changed location all the time.” Voris raises his bushy white eyebrows and looks at all of us, individually, before going on.

Now Stone sighs.

But Voris doesn’t seem to care. “So I wandered, found an old ruin actually brought into the museum intact—that was interesting—and then found that each display has an information button. You push it and a holographic guide tells you everything you want to know and a few things you don’t. If you push it twice, you can get a hard copy of the transcript, and if you push it three times, you can download that transcript to your own personal system, so long as you sign a few waivers promising not to use it for profit in any way.”

“What did you learn?” Mikk asks.

“That the fourteen archeologists were mentioned for precisely the reason that Dr. Stone said. Because they’re famous throughout the sector and it would look bad for them to just disappear here.”

Stone nods. She clearly feels vindicated.

“But,” Voris says, “I also learned that hundreds of Vaycehnese have died over the centuries in those so-called death holes. And for generations, the caves were off-limits to the Vaycehnese because people would die in weird little pocket areas.”

I take a bit of the spotted apple. It’s sweet and sour at the same time. I could easily become addicted to these things.

“There’s even some images of the first mummies—people they found in those pockets and then removed. There’s an entire section of the museum dedicated to the mummies of Wyr.”

Ilona lets out a breath of air.

“My God,” Bridge says.

“You’re kidding,” Lentz says, but it’s not because he believes Voris is lying, but because he’s stunned that Voris has learned this.

“You think your colleague knows?” I ask.

“I have no idea,” Lentz says. “I’ll ask him tomorrow.”

“He probably does, but doesn’t associate it with the death holes,” Voris says. “The reason the City Museum is there is for the schools. Children parade in and out of that place on assignments all the time. The mummies are one assignment, but they’re considered a mystery. Are they the first humans who came to Wyr before the colonists, or are they native? People connect certain areas of the caves with the mummies, but not the death holes themselves.”

“But you just said that the fields in these death holes recede,” Mikk says to Lentz.

Lentz nods. “I think the people who get trapped inside move away from the area where they entered. They lose oxygen or something—I don’t know—and they die. Then when the fields recede, someone goes in and finds a mummy—not where the person originally vanished, but farther inside.”

“That’s a theory,” Stone says.

“But a good one,” Ilona says, mostly because it reinforces her stealth-tech idea.

“Wouldn’t the Vaycehnese figure out that these phenomena are related?” Mikk asked.

“Not necessarily,” Voris said. “We’re looking for something specific. They’re all looking at the various peculiarities of their home.”

“Some of those peculiarities are just accepted,” Ilona says.

“Research blindness,” Bridge says. “That’s why we try not to have preconceptions.”

I sigh. I am starting to hate that word.

“We have preconceptions,” Ivy says. She is still rubbing her fingertips together. “Maybe they’re clouding our vision, too.”

“Maybe,” I say, “but let’s listen to Cesar. I suspect he has more to tell us.”

“Oh, yeah,” Voris says. “Because there’s a modern mystery to this place.”

There are a lot of mysteries on Vaycehn, more than I want to solve, simply because I want to get away from this hot, gravity-filled planet.

“You mean besides the fourteen archeologists?” Stone asks.

“Sixteen,” Voris says. “There were sixteen.”

We’re all staring at him now. He has a slight smile on his face, and his black eyes twinkle. He looks both impish and pleased with himself.

“Sixteen?” Stone says. “We would know if two others were missing. It would be big news.”

“It wasn’t big news because they were postdoctoral students,” Voris says. “They were working on some project of their own, hoping for recognition, when they just disappeared. The guides say they never came out. They hadn’t followed instructions, had gone into an off-limit area, and disappeared.”