Kristine Rusch - City of Ruins

Maybe it was the half-and-half dimensions that made Dix want to stay separate from Coop. They’d never discussed it, and they weren’t about to now.

“It sure as hell doesn’t look like Sector Base V,” Dix said. “But the readings say it is.”

It looked like Sector Base V to Coop. He recognized some of the specialized equipment, built with parts of the indigenous rock.

“We’re in the right point in space,” said Anita Tren. She stood at her post, even though her built-in chair brushed against her backside.

“Have you confirmed that we’re under Venice City?” Coop asked.

Venice City, the latest settlement. “Latest” was technically accurate, but the location, on the most remote planet in this sector, had been settled fifty years before Coop was born. At his first visit here, on his tenth birthday, he had thought the city old.

His father had laughed at that, telling Coop there were places in this sector that had been colonized for thousands of years. Human habitation, his father had said, although no one knew where those humans had originated.

The Fleet, everyone knew, originally came from Earth, but so long ago that no one alive had seen the home planet or even the home solar system. Earth felt like a myth, something rare and special and lost to time.

The base looked dimmer than usual. The equipment seemed smaller in the emptiness. Some lights were on, but not many. And the bulk of the base disappeared into the darkness.

“Is something wrong with the screens, then?” Coop asked Yash Zarlengo.

She had left her station. She had walked up to the nearest wall screen and was investigating it with her handheld, as well as with the fingertips of her left hand.

“I’m not reading any problems. These images are coming from the ship’s exterior just like they should be,” she said.

Coop frowned and wished, not for the first time, that the original Fleet engineers had thought it proper to build portals into the bridge. He would like to do a visual comparison of what he saw on the wall screens with what he saw out the portal.

But he would have to leave the bridge to do that.

So he snapped his finger at the most junior officer on deck, Kjersti Perkins. She didn’t even have to be told what he wanted. She nodded and exited.

Perkins would have to walk three-tenths of a mile just to get to the nearest portal. The bridge was in the nose of the ship, completely protected by hull. The original engineers had thought the portals were for tourists, and didn’t insert any until the ship widened into its residential and business wings.

But Coop couldn’t just worry about what was outside the ship. He also had to worry about what was inside the ship.

“Give me updated damage reports,” he said.

“Nothing new,” Yash said, which was a relief. Coop had been expecting more damage all over the ship. Normal activation of the anacapa drive often revealed weak spots in the ship, and this activation had been anything but normal.

It had been desperate—more desperate than he ever wanted to admit.

Fifteen days of drift—full engine failure, at least on the standard engines. The anacapa had worked—it had gotten them there, after all, wherever there was, which none of them could exactly figure out. It seemed like they’d moved dimensions just like they were supposed to, but something had gone wrong with the navigation equipment, confirmed by scans.

An asteroid field where there shouldn’t be one. A star in the proper position, but not at the proper intensity. A planet with two moons instead of the expected three.

Nothing was quite right, and yet a lot was. Coop hadn’t even wanted to think about the possibilities.

He hadn’t dared.

He’d set up the distress beacon, the one tied to the anacapa , so that it could reach any nearby bases, and prayed for an answer.

Which hadn’t come.

So he’d increased the scans. The Ivoire hadn’t been able to move yet—not with a regular drive, anyway, although repairs were coming along, as the engineers said—but everything else seemed to be working.

They should have gotten a response from two different bases: Sector Base V and Sector Base U, which was at the very edge of their range. Not to mention Starbase Kappa, which—according to the records—wasn’t that far from here.

Nothing. He’d left the signal on, but had checked it and had asked the science whiz kids in the school wing to work the design for a new signal, something a little less formal, he said, and he’d told their teacher what he really wanted was for them to build a new signal from scratch.

Just in case the old one had been damaged in the fight with the Quurzod, and somehow that damage hadn’t registered. He couldn’t spare the engineers to do the work. He needed the students more than he ever had before.

He hadn’t told the teacher that, but she clearly figured it out. She looked grimly determined and told him the kids would get on the project right away.

They were only half done when Dix caught the edge of a reply.

Automated from Sector Base V: We have heard your distress signal. We are prepared to use our own drive to bring you to us. If that is what you need, turn on your anacapa drive now.

Without a second thought, Coop turned on the drive, and the Ivoire whisked out of the drift, their drive piggybacking on Sector Base V’s.

The Ivoire ’s journey took half a minute, maybe less. They were drifting in an unknown part of space, and then they weren’t.

Then they were here, in Sector Base V, beneath the mountains that towered over Venice City.

They were here and they should have been safe.

But they weren’t.

Coop had a sense they were in more trouble than they’d ever been in before.

A Dignity Vessel.

An intact, functioning Dignity Vessel. My heart rate has increased and my breathing is shallow. My environmental suit issues warnings, thinking I’m in space, thinking I could die at any moment.

If I were wreck diving, my team on the skip would be talking to me via the comm. They’d tell me to leave the dive, return to the skip.

They’d accuse me of having the gids.

But the four in this room aren’t experienced divers. I haven’t even told them to turn on their monitors to monitor each other’s suits. They should have thought of it themselves; after all, they’ve gone on practice dives.

Not that it matters.

We’re not in space.

I make myself take a deep breath, will my heart rate to slow, will the gids to go away. Even though they’re not the gids.

What I’m feeling is excitement.

I’ve seen a few intact Dignity Vessels, and they are pitted and scarred and ruined and empty.

This one—this one glimmers with newness.

Finally, my brain kicks in. “Check the environment,” I tell the team. “Make sure nothing has changed.”

Our readings so far have shown that we’re in an oxygenated environment. We could survive without the suits, but we don’t. I’m glad for that since flakes swirl around us.

The Dignity Vessel has disturbed the entire area. The ripples caused some kind of disturbance, which makes sense. One moment the area in front of me was empty; the next it was filled with a gigantic ship.

I feel tiny beside it.

Here, in this cavernous room, I get a true sense of how big a Dignity Vessel is. They look tiny in space because space is so vast.

Here, though, here the vessel is bigger than any building we’ve seen on Vaycehn, bigger than some active spaceports.

I have to force myself to take another breath. In fact, I have to use a trick Squishy taught me back when we dived together. I count my breaths— inhaling for five seconds, exhaling for five seconds—until my breathing evens.