Kristine Rusch - City of Ruins

I nod. He’s right, of course. But he’s doing something besides mapping, something that he stopped doing as I turned.

“You were moving funny,” I say. It’s just a guess, but that’s the sense that I had, that he was making odd movements.

“Flapping my arms.” There’s a smile in his voice. I wish I can see his face. “I figure if our movement triggers the lights, maybe my movement will trigger some lights buried in the floor.”

“What’s in that floor might be what the ancients called danger,” I say.

“Or not,” he says. “So far, I have had no results.”

“Well, stop it,” I say. “Just map.”

He sighs, but lets his arms fall. He’s going to listen.

I start to turn back toward the console when the air waves. Like heat mirages. The air is actually rippling.

My breath catches. I turn toward Rea and realize that the rippling is stronger near him. Has he created it? Or is something happening there?

“Rea!” I yell. “Run!”

He doesn’t seem to understand.

“Get out of here!” I yell.

The others head for the door. I do too. Rea moves a little slower. The rippling gets worse. He looks like a video that’s falling apart. Then he slides out of the area and gets to the doorway.

Something whooshes behind me.

I whirl and blink, unable to believe what I’m seeing.

A Dignity Vessel is parked in that broad expanse of floor. An intact, clean, vibrating Dignity Vessel.

I murmur something—a curse maybe, or just a sound of awe. I’m aware of making noise, but not of what kind of noise I’m making. Rea pushes up against me.

DeVries says, “Oh, my…”

No one else speaks.

“Was there something solid on that floor when you were there?” I ask Rea.

He shakes his head.

“I was standing there,” he says. “I would’ve been crushed.”

The ripples. That Dignity Vessel became visible. We just saw the transition between stealth mode and nonstealth mode. Or something like that.

I glance at the numbers screen. It has stopped on the last set. Nothing runs. Then I look at the other screens. The one that had gone black now shows a black room with little white figures in it. Human-shaped.

It takes me a moment to realize those figures are us. We’re seeing ourselves in our suits staring at the screen.

Looking away from the camera. Which has to be on the Dignity Vessel.

It wasn’t in stealth mode in this chamber. It had been somewhere else until a little while ago. Somewhere with that strange patch of space.

“We triggered it,” I say.

“What?” DeVries asks.

“I think we summoned it back here.” I make myself record everything— the screens, the changes in the console.

“What do you mean, we summoned it?” Rea asks.

I shouldn’t say this, with all my lectures about theories and suppositions. But I do. “We entered the chamber and it came alive. When it did, it must have sent some kind of message—maybe that someone is here. Maybe that the chamber is functional again. It called the vessel here.”

“Called it home,” DeVries says softly. “Ilona was right. This is where they were built.”

I shake my head. “She’s right about the stealth, and she’s right that Dignity Vessels are connected here. But look at this chamber. The vessel fills this part. There’s no room to build. This is an arrival port or a maintenance unit.”

“Or both,” Rea says.

“That’s why the danger,” I say. “No one can stand where you were. There’s not enough warning to get out of the way.”

No klaxons, no bells. I glance up. The ceiling didn’t open. Nothing changed except the vessel appeared here.

“I’ll bet there’s a death hole on the surface,” I say.

“Above us?” Kersting asks.

I shake my head. “Maybe around us. Behind us. Horizontal. Taking some of the force of that extra stealth energy.”

“That’s what death holes are?” Rea asks.

“It’s a guess,” I say. It’s all a guess. Until we can examine everything.

I walk forward. A functioning Dignity Vessel. Probably with some kind of homing program, some way to come back here to this base.

If our entry has called one vessel home, how many others will come?

Maybe not many. Of all the Dignity Vessels we’ve found, none have been functional.

This one is, by some miracle.

This one is.

They landed smoothly, which surprised the hell out of Coop. The Ivoire had suffered more damage than he ever could have imagined, and yet the venerable old craft had gotten them here, mostly in one piece.

For a brief moment, he bowed his head. He took a deep breath and let a shudder run through him—the only emotion he’d allowed himself in more than a week.

Then he raised his head and looked.

The walls had full screens, top to bottom, just like he’d ordered. It didn’t matter much when the Ivoire transitioned, but now that the ship had arrived at Sector Base V, the walls told him a lot.

A lot that he didn’t understand.

The Ivoire had landed inside the base, just like usual. The ship stood on the repair deck, just like it was supposed to.

The base was cavernous. It had to be. Like the other ships of her class, the Ivoire was large. She comfortably housed five hundred people, providing family quarters, school, and recreation in addition to being a working battleship. Two ships the size of the Ivoire could fit into this base, with another partially assembled along the way.

Not to mention the equipment, the specialized bays, the private working areas.

The sector base was huge and impossible to process all at once.

But what Coop could process looked wrong.

For one thing, no one manned the equipment. Much of it looked like it wasn’t even turned on. The lights were dim or off completely. The workstations—the ones he could see in the half-light—looked like they’d suffered minor damage.

But he didn’t know how they could have. Like all the sector bases, Sector Base V was over a mile underground in a heavily fortified area. No one could get in or out without the proper equipment.

To his knowledge, no sector base had ever been attacked, not even in areas under siege. Granted, his knowledge wasn’t as vast as the history of the Fleet, but he knew how difficult it was to damage a sector base

Although it looked like someone had harmed this one. Because it had been fine a month ago.

Before the battles with the Quurzod, he’d brought the Ivoire in for its final systems check and repair. He had known that he wouldn’t get another full-scale repair for a year, maybe more. Particularly if the Fleet conquered the Quurzod and moved on, like planned. Then the Ivoire and the other ships in the Fleet wouldn’t get the full-scale treatment for five years. It would take that long to build Sector Base W, at the edges of the new sector of space.

He hadn’t planned on ever returning here.

He certainly hadn’t planned on returning here in defeat.

Or what felt like defeat.

And now the base looked wrong.

“You sure we’re seeing Sector Base V?” he asked Dix Pompiono.

Dix stood at the station farthest from Coop, in case the bridge got hit. Dix figured that if as much distance as possible separated them, one of them would survive.

Coop had always figured if the bridge got hit, the entire vessel would disappear. The anacapa drive—small as it was—was located on the bridge itself. If the drive took a direct hit, then the drive’s protections would fail. Half the ship would be in this dimension, half in another—if they were lucky. If they weren’t, the entire thing might explode.